


Lost Days

by sistercacao



Category: Gundam Wing, Silent Hill (Video Game Series)
Genre: Gore, Horror, M/M, Post-Canon, Preventers (Gundam Wing)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-09 15:23:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13484343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sistercacao/pseuds/sistercacao
Summary: The space station Persephone has sent out an SOS signal. Agents Duo Maxwell and Heero Yuy are sent to investigate. But what should be a routine mission turns out to be anything but, as the agents are pulled into a nightmare that threatens to take their sanity and their lives.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to LJ in 2010.
> 
> Heavily inspired by the Silent Hill series, as well as the classic John Carpenter movie, The Thing.

_One need not be a chamber to be haunted,_  
 _One need not be a house;_  
 _The brain has corridors surpassing_  
 _Material place._  
  
 _Emily Dickinson_  
  
  
Duo sat hunched over the body of his dead friend and waited for tears to come, but they never did. That last, throaty rasp of exhaled breath echoed in his ears, would continue to echo for the rest of his life, whenever he heard the word ‘plague’. They were alone, the other kids far away, where it was safe, where they wouldn’t be touched by disease. The room was dark and cold, wet around the edges from rain cascading down between the jagged panes of the broken windows. The corpse, who had once been Solo, was ashen and purple-lipped, and terrifying. It was his friend and it wasn’t.  
  
Solo’s ocean-blue eyes were open, staring up at the dirty ceiling without comprehension, and Duo reached out a hand to close them, because it seemed like the right thing to do. His fingers ghosted across fine, brown lashes and suddenly those blue eyes were on him, glassy and dry, but fixed on him all the same, watching him, and the barest ghost of a smile crept up those dead lips, a cold hand closing tightly around his wrist as Duo opened his mouth to scream--  
  
Duo shot up off the cot with a jolt, panting, eyes wide. For a moment, his mind raced beyond him, still reeling with the shock of the dead boy’s touch, his gaze, before he got his bearings and realized with an embarrassing rush of relief that it was entirely imaginary. He was on a ship, not L-2, not in a hollowed-out building.  
  
Christ, he hadn’t dreamt that in years.  
  
He was in no mood to try going back to sleep. Pulling himself shakily off the cot, he headed toward the cockpit, shrugging on the uniform jacket he’d left strewn across a chair.  
  
“I thought you were taking a nap,” Heero said dryly at Duo’s entrance.  
  
“Yeah, it was a bust,” Duo said, hopping into the copilot’s seat without further elaboration. “What’s our ETA?”  
  
“We have a couple more hours.” Heero gave him a sidelong glance, then swung his gaze back to the dashboard screen as he added, “...nightmare?”  
  
Duo sighed. “How’d you know?”  
  
“I heard you shout, and I figured...” Heero finished with a shrug.  
  
“So, the SOS was a routine ‘distress’ signal, right?” Duo blurted. As an attempt to change the subject, it was rather pathetic. They both had been exhaustively briefed on the mission details hours ago.  
  
His partner gave him a long look. “Routine distress, yes, but no radio contact has been achieved since the call went out. That suggests possible loss of electricity or other mechanical failure. The current mission parameters are to ascertain the status of the crew and perform an evacuation.”  
  
“Easy as pie, huh?”  
  
Heero smirked. “Let’s hope.”  
  
They were somewhere near Mars, en-route to the Persephone Four, an ESUN research space station whose SOS had been recently intercepted. Normally, they wouldn’t dispatch Preventers for just an evacuation, but the Persephone was a bit of an odd case; it was a Preventers ship, and all the non-scientist crew aboard were members of the agency, not government employees. According to the mission briefing, the ship was loaned out on a ten-year contract agreement, the ESUN providing the scientists and the Preventers providing everything else, including the first response to any and all emergency signals.  
  
Last year, they’d been on a similar mission: a small patrol ship off L-3 had sent out an SOS for a computer system malfunction that had nearly turned into a full-blown tragedy when the emergency generator had become unexpectedly compromised. They had somehow managed to get everyone off of the ship intact and with only minor decompression sickness. Duo supposed that their success on that front was the reason he and Heero had been assigned this mission now. He hoped this one would be much less dramatic of a rescue; that patrol ship incident had shaved a few years off his life for sure.  
  
“Listen, I’m wide awake, sure you don’t want to grab some shut-eye?” Duo asked now, one hand absently fiddling with the embroidered insignia on his jacket.  
  
“I’m fine.” Heero replied, glancing over Duo’s nervous movements, heavy brows shadowing his gaze. “What about you?”  
  
“Never better, Yuy,” Duo said evenly.  
  
“You were shouting.”  
  
Duo’s response was a one-shouldered shrug and the pointed cock of an eyebrow. The adrenaline rush that had woken him was already dissipating out of his system, the images of the corpse, the dead smile, already hazy, mercifully difficult to recall. He didn’t want to dwell on any of it, let alone hash it out with Heero.  
  
Heero let out a frustrated sigh, but seemed to realize that he wasn’t going to get any more out of him. “I’ll go get us some water.”  
  
He returned a minute later with two hydration packs, coming up around behind the copilot’s chair to hand one to Duo.  
  
“You never used to be this nosy,” Duo muttered, fiddling with the easy-open corner of the little plastic pouch. These things were a damn pain in the ass.  
  
A hand snaked up under his braid to rest at the base of Duo’s neck, fingers tangling softly in his hair.  
  
“Things changed,” Heero said.  
  
Yeah, they certainly had. If someone had asked Duo even six months ago if he ever thought Heero would touch him like this, he’d have laughed in their face. Or decked them, more likely. Even the other Gundam pilots had teased him about his puppy-dog devotion at their own peril. And then, one day, it had just happened, the two of them falling together so easily, as if it always been meant to be, the fault of circumstance or pride or fear that it had taken them so long. Maintenance in his apartment complex had compelled Heero to stay over at Duo’s for a few days, and it had been the proximity, the palpable, maddening tension, that had done most of the work for them in the end. The few months since had seen the blossoming of something new and exciting and incredible between them. Duo could still barely believe, sometimes, that he wasn’t still pining away for his quiet, inscrutable partner, that Heero had, amazingly, felt the same all along.  
  
“You’re gonna tear that to shreds, Duo,” Heero teased, watching him struggle with the water pack. His hand gently disentangled itself from Duo’s hair and he snatched the pack away, ripping it neatly and easily at the corner. “Here.”  
  
“I had it mostly open already,” Duo muttered, taking it back.  
  
Heero snorted and returned to his seat, his own pack in hand.  
  
A pensive silence fell between them, the hum of the computers and the rumble of the engines the only sound in the room. Duo stared out into space, that calm, serene black ocean, and tried to let it ease the uncomfortable hollow in his chest the dream had left behind. He had once been used to this, this weird, emptied-out feeling that would follow him around for the rest of the day, back when nightmares had been commonplace. But he no longer saw death every day now that the war had ended, no longer kept those memories clinging to the forefront of his mind. It had been years since he had dreamt about that night. He didn’t know what to do when he felt this way anymore. He was out of practice and disarmed. He watched the stars, but they proved little help.  
  
Eventually, the autopilot sounded, indicating they were close to their destination, and the two Agents began to make preparations for emergency boarding, Heero taking over the maneuvering of the ship, Duo grabbing their codec earpieces and weapons from their cases back in the berth.  
  
In the center of their field of vision, a small, grey object became visible among the stars: the space station Persephone Four, floating serenely in stasis. As they approached, the flat grey of its hull took sharper form, expanded outward to become enormous paneled wings and massive tail. Its body domed slightly at the top and bottom, but widened at the center, taking on a gentle rectangle for a shape. Satellite dishes and myriad lights dotted its surface, blinking intermittently; there was at least power on the ship. That was a relief.  
  
“I’m going to patch through to their radio,” Duo said, receiving a nod of acknowledgement from Heero. They needed to get an update on the status of the crew, and the conditions on board.  
  
Duo fiddled with the computer for a few moments, inputting the Persephone’s coordinates so the radio could hone in on their signal. “All right, looks like we’re through.”  
  
Duo entered in the code to activate the call and spoke. “Persephone Four, this is Agent Maxwell with Agent Yuy on the Icelus Seven, responding to your SOS. Requesting a status update and permission to board. Do you copy?”  
  
Their computer showed a connection had been achieved, but there was no response on the other end. A thin whisper of static broke through, then went quiet.  
  
“Persephone Four, do you copy?” Duo repeated. “This is the Icelus Seven, responding to your SOS and requesting an update from you, and permission to board.” Under his breath, he muttered an additional, “...if you don’t fucking mind.”  
  
The radio returned a static hiss, and then nothing.  
  
“Well, this is just great,” Duo sighed. He tried the message a few more times, and got nothing for his trouble. “Real smart of them to leave the radio unmanned while they’re waiting to be rescued.”  
  
Heero’s brows pursed in contemplation. “That’s unusual. We’ll have to unlock the hatch door remotely.”  
  
“Roger that, buddy,” Duo replied, entering rapid lines of code into the computer as Heero maneuvered them toward the entrance of the docking bay, aligning the Icelus along the hull until the enormous hatch door stood impassively before them.  
  
Duo tried the sequence once, twice, three times, but the doors remained shut. They shouldn’t have, they should have swung right open on the first try, but there they were, shut tight and unresponsive.  
  
“Shit,” Duo muttered, frustration mounting, “the hatch doors are totally unresponsive. How the hell are we going to get on there?”  
  
Heero frowned out the window of the cabin. “They shouldn’t be,” he said, “it looks like there’s still power on the station. Are you sure you entered the unlock sequence correctly?”  
  
“Yeah, I am,” Duo replied flatly. “I  _know_  it should open. It’s fucking weird.”  
  
“The computer system might be damaged,” Heero said, already moving to the hall closet to retrieve a space suit. “We’ll have to open it ourselves.”  
  
Stripping off his jacket, Heero donned the suit and helmet, and stalked out of the cockpit to the exit bay. A few minutes later, the intercom in the room crackled, and Heero’s voice, tinny inside his helmet, came through.  
  
“Ready.”  
  
“Roger that,” Duo replied, and opened the bay doors, watching Heero, suit secured firmly to their ship by a thick, insulated cord, jet out across open space toward the hatch of the Persephone Four. He free-floated the last few meters, coming to a gentle stop at the side of one of the wide doors.  
  
“The grid has power,” Heero noted, inspecting the control panels on the side of the door. “Maybe the satellite is screwed up. It should work from here.”  
  
“How would the SOS signal work and not the satellite?” Duo muttered aloud. He wasn’t happy with how the rescue mission was beginning. They wouldn’t be having this problem if anyone on the station would answer their call. That bothered him the most of all. Needless to say, he’d be going in armed and ready for anything.  
  
Heero grunted through the intercom. “Hm. The unlock sequence isn’t working here either.”  
  
“Gee, Heero, are you sure you entered it in correctly?”  
  
“Shut up. I’m going to try an override.”  
  
Duo watched Heero’s faraway form, huddled over the computer grid, inputting codes to no avail. The Preventers’ ships were all programmed with the same override codes, as far as he knew. It was a security measure designed to prevent situations like this, getting locked inside or outside of one’s ship in an emergency. As long as some power was running on the ship, nothing short of foul play should have been able to reprogram the override function like that. He supposed a mutiny of some kind could have happened, though it seemed strange for the crew of a research vessel to revolt. What, not enough petri dishes for their liking?  
  
So if not a mutiny, then what? Piracy? It wasn’t unheard of. A research facility was probably full of expensive equipment, and anyone who got the jump on a place as remote as this would have plenty of time to escape before anyone responded to the SOS. But if they hadn’t left...  
  
“Heero, buddy, I am getting a bad feeling about this. I think I’m gonna call in backup.”  
  
“All right. Let me try inputting this one more--”  
  
Suddenly, Heero flew back from the station’s hull, as if repelled by force, and the great doors of the docking bay ground open.  
  
“Woah!” Duo cried, “what kind of override was  _that_?”  
  
Heero grunted in surprise. “That wasn’t me.”  
  
“What do you mean, that wasn’t you?”  
  
Heero was floating in the space between the ship and the Persephone, his gaze directed at the hatch doors, now yawning wide open. “I hadn’t finished inputting the override. Someone else opened the doors.”  
  
“Someone inside?” Duo stared into the open mouth of the hatch. The dimly lit docking bay inside gazed serenely back.  
  
“I’m coming back on board.” Heero’s form jetted out of sight. There was a muted slam of doors from the far end of the ship, and in a few minutes Heero returned to the cockpit, still suited up.  
  
At his entrance, Duo pulled his gaze away from the open hatch before them, realizing then that he had been staring out at it, oddly transfixed, the entire time.  
  
“Did you make that backup call?” Heero said, placing a hand on the back of Duo’s seat.  
  
“Shit, sorry, doing it now.” He had been strangely spaced out there for a while. Rubbing his eyes absently, he entered the codec for Noin’s phone, then his security code. There was a moment or two of ringing and then the click of the call connecting through.  
  
“Noin speaking.”  
  
“Noin, it’s Maxwell and Yuy,” Duo said. “We’re preparing to board Persephone, but from the looks of it, it might get hairy. Think you can spare us a couple of backup Agents?”  
  
There was no answer on the audio-only feed.  
  
“Do you copy, Agent Noin?”  
  
Something garbled and unintelligible hissed through the speakers. It sounded something like Noin’s voice, though distorted, as if someone was fiddling with the bass and treble on the feed at random.  
  
“Noin, do you copy?” Duo repeated, flicking his gaze up to meet Heero’s conspicuously annoyed one.  
  
The garbled sound filtered through again, then dissolved into static.  
  
“Shit!” Duo cursed, breaking the connection and immediately typing the codec again. This time, however, there was no audible response whatsoever; they were greeted with that same obnoxious static.  
  
“What the fuck?” Duo muttered as he hung up.  
  
“Some kind of interference?” Heero offered.  
  
“Yeah, shit. This is pissing me off. Fuck!”  
  
Heero’s hand on the chair slid down to Duo’s shoulder and squeezed. The unexpected gesture appeared to shock Duo out of his temper, the angry lines softening instantly on his face.  
  
“Let’s go in?” Heero said at length.  
  
“I really don’t like this,” Duo muttered softly. He was looking out again at the open, gaping hatch.  
  
“Neither do I,” Heero admitted. The computer lock-down, the codec interference, the high likelihood that they would be met with hostility when they entered, none of it was what they had expected of this mission.  
  
Then again, maybe someone at HQ had. After all, they’d sent a two-man army out on a routine distress call, instead of junior Agents. Maybe that should have raised more questions.  
  
“I’m calling Noin in two hours,” Duo said in capitulation.  
  
“Roger that.”  
  
With a sigh, Duo put his hands once again on the ship’s controls and rolled it forward toward the open hangar, engaging its landing gear. He felt the wheels make contact with the polished bay surface, squealing slightly. The readouts on their console, monitoring the atmosphere outside their ship, indicated that there was still oxygen pumping through the station. Not a surprise to either of them, as they had expected the Persephone to be occupied, but at least it meant they didn’t have to don their suits, and Heero immediately began the process of removing his. Easier to fight without them.  
  
They pulled slowly into the docking bay, wheels squealing below, until their ship came to a full stop in the wide, empty hangar.  
  
“Well, we’re here.”  
  
No sooner had Duo spoken than they both heard a resounding, screeching crash behind them.  
  
“If I’m not mistaken,” Duo muttered, “I would say that was the fucking hatch closing.”  
  
Heero, eyes flicking upward to the video feed of the rear of the ship, nodded. The hatch bay door had slammed shut behind them.  
  
“Bring ammo,” was all Duo said after that.  
  
They stashed their guns firmly in holsters at their sides, ammo pocketed in every available location. The tiny over-ear codecs went on next. Heero, finishing his preparation, turned to catch Duo slipping a knife into his boot and smirked. Loading up for presumably outnumbered combat like this reminded him a little of the war.  
  
“What happened to that priest’s collar?” He said suddenly. Duo looked up from checking the straps on his holsters to give him a slightly confused grin.  
  
“It went the way of your spandex shorts,” he replied. “Why? Feeling a little nostalgic, Yuy?”  
  
“It’s been a while since we did this.”  
  
“Yeah, I know. Just like old times, huh?” Now he was really grinning. They had really enjoyed fighting at each other’s side back then, hadn’t they? It was a wonder they hadn’t figured out what that had meant sooner, Heero thought with a smirk.  
  
Shrugging on their jackets, they went to the console and set the ship to hibernate. They would need the ship powered up and ready to go if they had to make a quick getaway. They would just have to hope that the damn hatch door would choose to cooperate if that happened.  
  
“This is still a rescue mission,” Heero said, as they were preparing to leave. “We have to determine the status of the crew before trying to reclaim the station.”  
  
“Anywhere in particular you’d like to start looking?”  
  
In his mind, Heero conjured up the layout of the ship, which they had both taken some time to memorize en route. “The mess hall and berth are relatively close to this hangar.”  
  
“I vote mess hall. Less rooms to check, we’ll be done faster.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“I still want to call Noin at 2100 hours,” Duo added, checking his watch.  
  
Heero nodded.  
  
“All right, fuck it. Let’s go.”  
  
With Duo’s final epithet, they exited the ship for Persephone’s silent docking bay.  
  
It was a little warm on the research station, the air conditioning being one of the first sacrifices for the emergency generator’s sake. The lights around the dock were low, but shone steadily down on them, leaving the smooth surface of the deck slightly gleaming. Everything was a cool, muted grey, sterile in the absolute silence. They scoped the perimeter, checking to confirm they were alone, then made their way quietly to the exit, leaving the dock and their ship behind them as the automatic doors opened with a gentle  _swish_.  
  
They found themselves in a wide, empty corridor, one of the main halls of the ship according to the specs. Behind them and off to the right would be the berthing compartments, stowed below deck; in front of them, to the left, would be the mess hall, and beyond that, the first laboratory. There were three in total on the station, as well as an infirmary, recreation center, and other offices and storage rooms.  
  
The Persephone Four housed forty-three crew in total, mostly researchers, at the time that it went offline. They were greeted, however, by total, heavy silence in the hallway. The floors, walls, and ceilings were pristine, painted that same flat grey. No signs of life, but, at least, no signs of a struggle either.  
  
Heero moved easily behind Duo, watching their back as Duo cleared the front, and they made their way up the corridor toward the mess hall. One wall sported a floor map; its contents already memorized, they paid it only brief attention. As they approached the blind left turn, they took to the wall, just in case, and Duo did a corner check before they continued around it.  
  
The place was kept incredibly, disarmingly clean. Heero could see his reflection in the floor’s laminated gleam. It was a good thing, he supposed; no blood marks, no bullet holes, but he would have expected scuff marks on the floor at least. They looked instead like they hadn’t ever been touched.  
  
Silence surrounded them so thoroughly that even their deliberately muted steps seemed loud in the hallway. Was it the powered-down state of the air conditioning that made it seem so quiet? The lack of any ambient noise whatsoever was... disquieting.  
  
They arrived at the doors to the mess hall, and both men took up sides, hands firmly on their still-holstered guns. Duo put up his fingers to count down.  _Three, two, one_.  
  
Drawing guns even as they busted open the double doors, they burst into the brightly lit mess hall, but were met with nothing more than silence.  
  
The room was a simple cafeteria, with two rows of tables, laying bare now under the fluorescent lights, taking up much of its space. In a far corner, there was a window into the empty kitchen, a few empty garbage cans crowded against the wall. The center of the room sloped gently downward, leading to a drain in the center of the floor, presumably for ease of cleaning.  
  
Something about the scene was odd, but hard for Heero to place. His subconscious, however, was on full alert, and his grip tightened imperceptibly around the gun in his hand.  
  
It was Duo who broke the silence at last.  
  
“How long has this place been offline?” He asked, his eyes scanning the tiled, white floor.  
  
“The SOS went out thirty-six hours ago.”  
  
“Then why is this place so fucking  _clean_?”  
  
That was it, that was what bothered him about the mess hall. The corridors, he might be able to understand, but people had to eat, and they would have been eating in here. There should have been garbage in the cans, some kind of evidence of the mess hall’s use. Hell, even the kitchen looked untouched. It didn’t look like anyone had  _ever_  been here.  
  
Though he shared Duo’s confusion, Heero attempted an explanation. “It’s possible that they cleaned immediately before the emergency arose.”  
  
“The way this place looks, that must have been one  _hell_  of a job they-- did you see that?”  
  
Duo was staring in the direction of the kitchen window, his gun immediately at eye-level and trained on the spot. Heero followed suit, his gun’s sights set on the window, though he couldn’t see anything.  
  
“Hello?” Duo called.  
  
“What was it?”  
  
“I thought I saw something move in the kitchen.”  
  
Heero’s mood instantly sharpened. “Hostile?”  
  
“I don’t know. I don’t see it any--” Duo cut off his remark abruptly and Heero immediately saw why.  
  
Someone was moving past the window of the kitchen, making its way toward them.  
  
“Hey!” Duo called to the dark shape, which was approaching the kitchen doors slowly. It was hard to make out any features from their distance. “Hello?”  
  
The person didn’t respond, ambling indifferently through the doors. One leg appeared past the threshold, then another, and it pulled itself into the room.  
  
“Don’t come any closer, or I’ll be forced to fire!” Duo said, then his gun lowered a bit and his eyes went wide. “What the fuck?”  
  
Hunched over, seemingly naked, the figure  _gleamed_  in the white fluorescent lights, its skin a sickening, charred brown, oozing something oily and obscene. Its legs, scabbed and ragged, appeared free, but its arms, or what might have been called arms once, seemed melted together, a fleshy, tarry lump held uselessly to its chest. Its head seemed to contain only a mouth, gaping, mawing, no teeth to disrupt the expanse of blackness within, the flesh around it bereft of eyes, nose, ears.  
  
Heero stared, and something came unbidden to him, as if his very subconscious was screaming it.  
  
 _It isn’t human._  
  
Slowly, inexorably, the thing came toward them. It shambled past the sterile tables, ruined legs barely seeming to hold its frame upright, the angry hole of its mouth yawning at them.  
  
“Don’t get any closer!” Duo shouted, his voice surprisingly steady, his gun was trained right at the thing’s head. “I will shoot!”  
  
Unhearing, uncaring, it approached. Every cell in his body seemed poised to run, but Heero only followed his partner’s lead and raised his gun to focus its sights, too, on the figure’s head.  
  
It was close now, and he could smell it, his nose filling with an acrid, wet stench. There was a nauseating wave of familiarity to the smell, but he couldn’t identify it. Five more steps, he decided, and he’d shoot.  
  
“I said, don’t get any fucking closer!”  
  
It only put another foot forward, then another. Five steps, Heero reminded himself. Four... Three...  
  
With a muttered epithet, Duo fired at the figure, hitting it three times, point blank, in the head. It collapsed to the ground with a dull splat and went still.  
  
For a moment, they just stared at the corpse. Heero realized that his heart was beating wildly in his chest, that his adrenaline had risen to alarming levels. It was the deep, primal fight-or-flight response-- something that had once been trained almost entirely out of him.  
  
Duo also seemed to be having trouble calming down. His eyes were wide, his pupils dilated. Feeling Heero’s gaze, he wrenched his eyes from the thing on the ground and stared at him.  
  
“What the fuck is that?”  
  
Heero could only shake his head. For a second, they just stared at each other, not wanting to move toward the figure lying prone before them. Then, guns still drawn and pointed firmly on the thing, they approached its motionless form.  
  
It looked dead, at least. Not that anything that looked as... damaged as that thing should have been alive in the first place. It lay face-down, legs hideously splayed, bleeding a sluggish stream of that same ugly, blackish ooze that trickled slowly toward the drain in the center of the room. They made no motion to turn it over for a better look, but Duo dropped to a squat at its side when he had gotten close, apparently confident it wouldn’t be getting up again.  
  
“What the fuck...” he repeated, entirely to himself. His eyes scanned the prone, scabbed form in disbelief. “What kind of experiments were they doing here, anyway?”  
  
“Something to do with quantum physics. Exotic matter, I think.”  
  
“No Frankenstein shit, though... right?”  
  
“No. Nothing that would produce something like this.”  
  
Shaking his head, Duo stood up, finally holstering his gun. “So, then what? Some kind of chemical attack? I don’t know of anything that makes someone turn out like  _that_.”  
  
Heero stared at the thing, at the trickle of slime winding down the grooves of the tiled floor. “I don’t know.”  
  
“Well, this rescue mission is off to a  _great_  start, wouldn’t you say?” Duo sighed. “I’m going to check the kitchen. Watch that guy.”  
  
Gingerly stepping around the corpse, Duo stalked into the kitchen, flicking the light switch there. Heero could hear things being overturned as Duo cleared the area.  
  
“Nothing here,” he said finally, stepping back into the mess hall.  
  
“Let’s move on,” Heero replied.  
  
“Fine by me. Just looking at this thing is making me sick.” Duo hurried around the body and joined Heero at the door, hand travelling back to his gun. He didn’t say so, but Heero was eager to leave the thing far behind him, as well.  
  
The first thing Heero noticed when they stepped back into the hallway were the marks. Where the floor had been spotless only minutes ago, now it was lined with thin, black streaks, as if someone had just hurried down the hall in dirty shoes. Heero was certain, however, that they hadn’t heard anyone pass the mess room.  
  
Duo saw them too, and had his gun instantly drawn again.  
  
“Wanna see where these go?”  
  
Heero nodded, and they made their way silently down the hall, back towards the docking bay. The streaks were everywhere now on the once-gleaming floors. They continued down the corridor, past the floor map, disappearing around the next bend. The two agents kept to the walls, checking around each corner before they continued. After clearing the turn, they followed the marks until they appeared to veer off under the door to the berthing compartments.  
  
“Guess we were planning to look here anyway,” Duo said, without any enthusiasm.  
  
Nodding, Heero pushed the button and the doors slid quietly open.  
  
Space was at a premium on a small research station like the Persephone, which meant that the sleeping quarters were kept on a lower floor. The doors led to a staircase, the same stark grey, bleakly lit by the overhead lights. The marks slid all the way down them, a clear line for the berth.  
  
They made their way cautiously down the stairs, guns trained in front of them, in case whoever left the tracks decided to surprise them. At the bottom, they found two doors, one leading to the women’s berth, one to the men’s.  
  
The streaks led off under both doors.  
  
“I know what you’re going to say,” Duo muttered.  
  
“We should split up.”  
  
“Bingo. Do I get a prize or something?”  
  
“I’ll take the women’s side.”  
  
“I don’t like this.” Duo was staring at the twin paths on the ground, leading in separate directions.  
  
“It would take twice as much time to search the berths together.”  
  
“Yeah, but...” Duo sighed. “I just have a bad feeling, is all.”  
  
Heero, too, was still feeling that uncomfortable pull to leave in the back of his mind. But they had no choice. Their mission was to rescue the Persephone’s crew and, if possible, salvage the station. That meant they had to engage whoever was on the ship with them.  
  
They had no choice.  
  
Turning to face his partner, Heero tapped his earpiece, then, experimentally, gave Duo a reassuring smile. “Contact me if something happens.”  
  
Duo’s worried face softened slightly, his gaze lingering on Heero’s. Then, he tapped his earpiece in return. “Roger.”  
  
With that, the two men took their positions at each compartment door and, with a last glance at each other, stepped inside.  
  
* * * *  
  
The berthing compartment was laid out like a dormitory in miniature, a narrow hallway leading off into bunk-bedded rooms, dead-ending at the toilets. Duo counted twelve rooms in total, six on the left, six on the right. According to the specs, the Persephone could accommodate fifty passengers; he assumed that meant twelve rooms on the women’s side, and two private rooms elsewhere.  
  
The tracks that had led them there meandered halfway down the corridor before veering off into one of the rooms. Not exactly chomping at the bit to go chasing down their source, Duo decided to start with the nearest rooms and work his way down. And he would do it as leisurely as he damn well pleased.  
  
Just like everything else in the ship, the rooms were spotless. Thinking back on Heero’s theory, he wondered sarcastically if perhaps the crew hadn’t had the sheets laundered and pressed, too, right before signalling an SOS and vanishing into thin air.  
  
The layout of each room was identical: two twin bunks, securely bolted to the wall, a couple of desks, and one dresser and standing closet per person. Besides that, nothing. Literally nothing. Duo couldn’t find a single personal item in any of the rooms he checked. No computers, no clothes, no posters; hell, not even a dirty magazine. Needless to say, he found no people, either.  
  
Anxiety thrummed in Duo’s nerves, despite himself. There was no goddamn way this is how the Persephone had looked while under operation. None of these rooms looked like anybody had ever stepped foot in them before. It was like walking through a museum. A crypt.  
  
How was Heero doing on his side? Duo hadn’t heard a thing except his own nervous breathing since they’d split up. If he’d found something, Duo was sure he’d hear about it. And the walls weren’t thick enough to muffle gunfire. So, at least Heero hadn’t run into another one of those... things.  
  
He cleared two rooms, then four, then six, each one utterly empty, beds pristine, devoid of human presence. Next was the room the marks led to. Duo did a compulsive check of his gun clip, just in case. Then, resolute, he turned the corner, half expecting something nasty to greet him.  
  
There was nothing there. The tracks stopped dead in the center of the room. Duo walked right up to where they ended and looked around. Nothing.  
  
Was this some kind of really shitty joke?  
  
Annoyed, Duo turned to exit, ready to move the hell on. Coming down to the berth, it appeared, had been a giant waste of time.  
  
He was at the door when he heard the distinct sound of something small dropping to the floor behind him.  
  
Whirling around, he saw what had fallen: a small gold cross on a chain.  
  
“What the hell?” He muttered aloud. He found himself walking back into the room and kneeling, picking up the necklace gently to examine it in the palm of his hand.  
  
Where had this come from?  
  
Pocketing it, he stood and turned again to the door. Stepping out into the hall, he drew a sharp breath.  
  
The streaks were gone. The floor was once again gleaming spotlessly, as if they had never been there at all.  
  
“No fucking way,” Duo seethed. He almost added another thought, one that had struck him first in the mess hall when they’d been faced with the  _thing_ : this is impossible. But something stopped him from giving that idea voice. It felt as if saying those words would be admitting something that he wouldn’t be able to take back. Instead, he continued as calmly as he could down the inexplicably clean hallway, clearing the last four rooms, the bathroom. As expected, they contained nothing, and, of course, no people.  
  
As he hurried out of the berth, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had been brought there just to find that damn cross.  
  
Heero was out of the women’s compartments already, waiting at the entrance for him.  
  
“Did you find anything?” Duo asked.  
  
“No. The tracks led to the bathroom, but no one was there.” Heero looked pretty angry at having been led to a dead-end. Duo imagined his own expression had to look pretty similar. “The marks are gone, by the way.”  
  
“Yeah, I noticed. And if you have any good theories on how  _that_  happened, I’d like to know.”  
  
“Did you find anything?” Heero said instead.  
  
Duo pulled the cross out of his pocket and showed it to Heero. He was decidedly unimpressed.  
  
“That’s it?”  
  
“Yeah, it was the only thing in the room with the tracks.” Duo paused, peering down at the little gold trinket in his palm.  
  
“Great,” Heero muttered. “That’s helpful.”  
  
Something was nagging at the back of Duo’s mind as he stared at the necklace. Holding the tiny thing in his hand, the metal slightly cool, the fine filigree of the chain glinting in the harsh light, he felt the distinct, physical pull of deja vu. He  _knew_ , somehow, that if he turned the cross around, he’d see a small, nearly microscopic date engraved onto it. How many times had he peered at those tiny numbers and wondered how steady of a hand it would take to etch them on? How often had he pulled the glittering chain off of his neck and held it delicately in his hands like this? It was the greatest gift he’d ever received, merely a tiny speck of shaped metal, yet utterly invaluable to him.  
  
What the hell was he thinking? This wasn’t the same cross, it  _couldn’t be_. He had lost that in the war, somewhere on  _Earth_ , for fuck’s sake.  
  
Defiant, he turned the cross over in his palm. There, along one edge, were the tiny, perfectly etched numbers.  _8.11.175_. He’d memorized them years ago just from looking at them so often.  
  
Impossible, his mind screamed. This is impossible.  
  
Suddenly, Duo was angry. Hell, he was as pissed off as he’d ever been in his life.  
  
“Fuck this,” he said, jamming the necklace back into his pocket. “I want off this fucking station, Heero. They can come back with a fucking regiment to finish this mission, for all I care, but I’ve had enough. I’m getting back on the goddamn ship and going home. I draw the line at monsters and disappearing shoe prints.”  
  
Heero stared at him, catching his gaze with uncomfortable intensity, as if he could see right through Duo’s anger to the very real fear brimming just beneath it. Suddenly, he was clearing the space between them, bringing up a hand to gently rest along Duo’s cheek, the other taking a comfortable, familiar position on his shoulder. Surprisingly, he didn’t look angry at all, though what Duo was suggesting would warrant serious disciplinary actions on their return. Instead, his expression was etched with concern, all those emotions, still barely explored between them, utterly exposed. He had never seen Heero look like this.  
  
“Let’s go,” Heero said.  
  
“Really?” Duo asked, despite himself.  
  
“You’re more important than this mission.”  
  
Duo felt a jolt in his chest and covered it with a thin smile. “Never though I’d live to hear you say  _that_ , Yuy.”  
  
In response, Heero pressed his mouth to Duo’s, lingering there for a moment before pulling gently away. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”  
  
“Roger that,” Duo replied, and now the grin on his face was real. He couldn’t wait until they were off this damn ship and back at headquarters, despite the reaming from Noin they were guaranteed when they stepped through the door. Shit, he was practically looking forward to it.  
  
They climbed the stairs, Heero watching their back. Thank God they were still close to the hangar, that they had decided to check the berth first and not the deeper recesses of the ship. They could be off of this god forsaken station in minutes.  
  
Pushing the wide compartment doors open, they stepped out into the hall.  
  
Duo drew in a sharp breath, too shocked for a moment to speak.  
  
This wasn’t the hall they had come from. The blind corner they had turned on their way here was gone, and in its place was a wholly unfamiliar intersection of three sterile grey corridors, leading off in separate directions.  
  
“What the hell is going on?” Heero muttered, staring at the new layout in disbelief.  
  
That word Duo had been dreading to use came spilling out now. “This is fucking impossible.”  
  
“There was only one exit from the berth... we  _couldn’t_  have taken a wrong door.”  
  
“This can’t be real. This is  _impossible_.”  
  
Something faraway began to whine-- an alarm, deep in the station somewhere. Heero turned in the direction of the sound.  
  
“What’s that alarm?”  
  
“I don’t fucking know, Heero!”  
  
“Duo, calm down!” Heero was angry, but was trying to keep his cool for Duo’s sake, he could tell. Did he think he was going to fall apart or something? That he couldn’t keep it together? Fuck that. Duo felt his temper rise to match his partner’s.  
  
The whine grew louder, becoming a howl.  
  
“Don’t tell me to calm down, buddy. We just got teleported, wormholed, who-the-fuck-knows-what to a different part of the ship, which, I don’t know if you noticed, does not fucking  _happen_. So unless you can give me a really good goddamn explanation and then a road map right the fuck back to our ship, don’t tell me to calm the fuck down!”  
  
The alarm blared over him now, drowning out his last few words with piercing screams. At the end of the hall in front of them, the overheard lights flickered and winked out. The lights at the farthest end of either side of their hallway extinguished themselves. Then, the next in the row went out. The next. The next.  
  
Heero drew his gun. The alarm wailed and wailed. Duo felt a strange movement under his feet and glanced down to see the gleaming, spotless paint below him curl and peel, slithering away down the hall into the darkness, leaving the walls and floor ragged, filthy black in its wake. The second to closest set of lights around them winked out.  
  
All Duo could hear was the scream of the alarm, and rushing in his ears, growing louder and louder, deafening him. He dropped to the dirty floor.  
  
“Duo!” Heero cried, from somewhere.  
  
Then, the lights above them died, and the darkness swallowed them.


	2. Chapter 2

His head was killing him.  
  
That was the first thought Heero had when he came to. Pain throbbed at his temples, forcing him to sit up, a slight wave of nausea washing over him at the movement.   
  
Where was he?   
  
Heero peered into the total darkness around him. He wasn’t in the hall anymore. Somehow, he found himself now in a room, one wall mirrored, his own confused face glaring murkily back at him. He was sitting on an examination table, placed in the center of the room. Medical odds and ends hung from the walls and off of the myriad countertops crowded around the table.   
  
Everything in the room looked decrepit and very, very old. Heero lifted his hand off the table and frowned at the grimy film covering it. The walls and floor, too, were caked with filth, a far cry from the spotless state of the Persephone when they’d arrived.  
  
Heero shoved himself off of the table with a grunt, willing his pounding headache to the back of his mind. Never mind the disgusting state of the room. Where was Duo?  
  
Truth be told, Heero had been more than ready to leave after their trip to the berth. He hadn’t been entirely honest with Duo: there  _had_  been something in the bathroom, where the tracks had terminated. Heero had opened the door to find the floor carpeted with little yellow flower petals, some sticking to the walls or piled in the sinks. It had been a disturbing sight, one that Heero hadn’t wanted to upset Duo with by sharing. But then Duo had appeared with that necklace, which seemed to bother him so much, and said that he wanted to abandon the mission. Seeing that haunted look in Duo’s eyes, he hadn’t found it very difficult to be persuaded.  
  
Duo was not in the room with him. Trying to reach him on the ear piece returned nothing but garbled static. Heero switched the codec off angrily, willing his rising anxiety down to acceptable levels. Panicking wouldn’t help. First, he had to orient himself, and then, he’d go find Duo.  
  
Heero was fairly certain he was in the infirmary, judging from the implements on the walls, oily with grime though they were. Though he had no idea how he’d arrived there, he knew from memory where he was on the ship. If he left the room and made an immediate right, he’d pass Laboratory One, and, eventually, the mess hall. If he continued past that, the hangar, and the entrance to the berth.  
  
Only, that wasn’t where they had been last, was it? They had ended up somewhere entirely different in the ship when they’d exited the berth, an intersection of empty halls whose unwelcome appearance Heero still couldn’t explain. There hadn’t been time; the darkness had taken them before he’d had a chance to get his bearings.  
  
Taken them. It certainly seemed so. How had he ended up here otherwise, if not taken? What if Duo was now somewhere completely different on the ship as well?   
  
He would just have to tear the ship apart. He would do whatever he had to in order to find him.   
  
“I’ll start with the berth,” he said aloud, in defiance of the heavy silence.  
  
Approaching the door, he was about to turn its blackened handle when something out of the corner of his eye caught his attention, a brief glimpse of movement. He turned and found himself staring at the enormous mirror on the far wall. His reflection stared back, impassive.  
  
No, he realized, it wasn’t his reflection. Not anymore.  
  
The mirror was scratched and filthy, cracked in places, but beneath the dirt he could clearly make out the once-familiar tank top and black shorts, the emotionless face of a younger boy. The Heero in the mirror stood exactly as he did, head held in the same way, eyes following his. But in his hands, he held something small and limp. A body.  
  
Heero couldn’t make out the features beneath the grime, but he  _knew_  what it was. It felt as if he could hold out his own hands, like his reflection, and feel the soft dead weight in them. As if he was not a Preventer, not here, but a soldier, a science experiment of fourteen. If he looked down at himself, would he see his uniform, or faded yellow sneakers?  
  
He refused to find out.   
  
“It’s not me,” he said to nobody.  
  
His reflection flickered, twisted, and the Heero in the mirror smiled back, as if to say:  _yes, it is._  
  
Then, the mirror exploded into a thousand ragged shards, the image of the boy within it shattering instantly.  
  
Heero turned the door handle then, shielding himself from the raining glass as best he could as he escaped out into the hallway.  
  
It was as if a thousand years had passed here. The pristine gleam of grey paint was utterly gone, the hallways coated with muck and ugly black smears. Some of the floor appeared ripped to shreds, revealing the scaffold structure beneath its panels, rusted and decayed. Everything reeked with that acrid wetness, the smell of that thing in the mess hall. It hung in the air and stung his eyes.  
  
Heero’s mind screamed with the sight of the hallway, the shattering of the mirror, the illusion of his reflection he’d seen. Nothing made any sense. He didn’t understand, and it felt almost as if trying to might break him.  
  
So he wouldn’t try, not until he was sure Duo was safe. He would adapt instead.  
  
It was nearly pitch black in the hall, and he moved slowly to avoid the open holes in the floor, drawing from memory the path he had to take to return to the berth. His steps made wet, sucking sounds beneath him, and echoed in the empty corridor.   
  
Luckily, it seemed he still had his gun. Heero did an automatic check of the clip even as he continued into the darkness. Plenty of ammo. He kept it drawn, a cold, smooth comfort in his hands.  
  
Laboratory One would be coming up soon, he knew. He would do a quick check for Duo, then continue onward.  
  
Something on the wall caught his eye as he passed it, a slash of red on the ashen black. He looked up and saw that someone had written across it, in an enormous scrawl, a message:  
  
 _ARE YOU LOST?_  
  
He put his free hand out to touch the paint, red and coagulated, but not fully dry. His fingers stumbled over something under the words, a seam, concealed by the message. A door?  
  
There was a room here? He couldn’t remember it from the floor plan. A storage room, maybe? He put his hand on the doorknob and gave it an experimental turn. It was unlocked. Heero paused, staring at the words in front of him.  _Are you lost?_  
  
Then, from within the room, he heard a sound, muffled and barely audible: someone inside was crying.  
  
Duo?  
  
A familiar pang of worry stabbed his chest, and he quickly opened the door and stepped inside the room.  
  
* * * *  
  
He was lying in garbage. Great. Of all the ways this day could get possibly worse.  
  
Duo picked himself up off the piled bags beneath him, wiping off his clothes compulsively with dismay. He sure knew now where all that magical missing trash had gone.  
  
Where was he? He didn’t remember a trash chute on the floor plans, but maybe he’d forgotten about it. Or maybe it had materialized out of thin fucking air. Maybe they were sending their garbage to another dimension and he’d been transported. After everything that had led up to this moment, nothing would really surprise him anymore.  
  
His head hurt and the smell in the room wasn’t helping matters. The space around him was small enough to see that he was alone, and that was enough detective work for him. He located the door and was out of there.  
  
He found himself not in the hall but in another room. Where the first had stank like garbage, this one had a different stench to it, but no less nauseating. It was strangely familiar, the smell, the sting of it in his nostrils. Cloying, acrid. It turned his stomach more than the state of the room itself.  
  
Every surface was covered in dirt and rust, the ceiling overhead gaping like a giant mouth, blackness staring down at him. The tiles of the floor were in disarray, some cracked, more missing, the floor underneath them charred and moist. A sink in the wall opposite him sat filled with filthy pots and pans, covered in something sticky and red, congealing down the sides of the sink and pooling on the ground below.   
  
Christ, was he in the kitchen? It was unrecognizable. So much for spotless; there wasn’t a damn thing in the room that wasn’t utterly disgusting.  
  
And where the hell was Heero? Was he okay? Had he also been deposited to another part of the ship? The second he found him, they were getting the hell off this goddamn thing and setting it ablaze, fuck what Noin would say about it. He wouldn’t let them send anyone else out here, it wasn’t safe. Everything about this mission was out of control.  
  
Duo picked his way through the debris in the kitchen-- overturned vats of unidentifiable liquid, cabinet doors hanging limply by their broken, rusting hinges-- and stepped into the mess hall, gun drawn. If that thing was still here, he was going to start shooting and not stop until it was a smear on the goddamn ground.  
  
It seemed there wasn’t a single table that wasn’t overturned in this new, nightmare version of the cafeteria. The chairs seemed to have been ripped off their supports and tossed in random directions, some of the metal twisted and contorted, as if melted by intense heat.   
  
He took another step into the room and something crunched under his shoes. Startled, he looked down and saw he was walking over the crumbling remains of bricks.   
  
In a space station?   
  
Maybe he was hallucinating. Maybe the emergency on the ship had been a chemical leak of some kind, and he was currently breathing enough of it in to make him loopy enough to imagine this shit, while big, swiss-cheese holes in his brain grew and grew, like the holes in the ceiling...  
  
Jesus, he had to snap out of it. He couldn’t afford to go bonkers yet, he had to find Heero and they had to get off the Persephone and way, way the hell away. In the meantime, he’d just have to act like bricks on the floor and melted chairs were the most normal thing in the world, or he really would go crazy.  
  
The smell in the air and the crunch under his shoes suddenly made him want very badly to reach for the cross in his jacket pocket. It took all of his resolve not to grab it and pull it out. There was that awful sense of deja vu in the back of his mind again.  
  
As soon as he stepped entirely into the room he could see there was still a body in the center of the floor. Was it just the darkness, or did it appear different, larger? No, it had changed, something had changed about it. But he couldn’t tell what, it was too dark and far away to see.  
  
God, he didn’t want to approach it. He would’ve given anything in the whole damn world not to go near it. But it was lying, face-down, right in the center of the room, directly between him and the door, and the skeletal piles of chairs and tables were blocking all the other avenues over there. He had to get closer.  
  
“Shit,” Duo muttered, flinching. Even whispering, his voice rang loudly in the wide, empty room.   
  
“Fuck,” he added, for emphasis.  
  
He had to get closer. He had to leave the room and find Heero and  _go_.   
  
Besides, he’d already decided he was hallucinating, hadn’t he? Hallucinations couldn’t actually hurt him. He forced a grin to his face that he absolutely didn’t feel. Fucking figments of his imagination, that was all that was in this room with him. He began to walk toward the body, his steps crunching beneath him. Imaginary brick, he assured himself. His fingers twitched, itching for that cross.  
  
He could see the body a little clearer now. The arms were different; that was to say, this corpse actually had some. They splayed out in front of it, as if it had been struck from behind and fallen on the spot. From the broad shoulders, cloaked in black though they were, it seemed to be a man. Something was trickling sluggishly past the body and into the drain with a thick, viscous sound. It stung his nose, mixed with the ash in the air. The copper-penny taste of it in his mouth, the burning in his nostrils, he knew it all. He had been here before. His hand betrayed his mind now and went desperately for the gold cross in his pocket, holding it fast between his fingers. It finally came back to him, staring down at that man, clad in charred robes, surrounded by the smell of burning flesh and wood and brick and mortar...  
  
It had been years since he had stood on this spot, seeing that body lying prone on the floor, one of maybe a handful of people who had ever given a damn about him in his whole miserable life lying dead before him. Father Maxwell.  
  
How could he have forgotten how the churchyard smelled then, the stink of death heavy over the burned remains of his home? Had his life since then really gotten so easy and routine, normal and even happy, that he had forgotten that once he had stood trembling over the dead bodies of his loved ones and known with a deep, unforgiving certainty that it was all his fault?  
  
Duo stood at the side of Father Maxwell’s corpse, watching his blood trickle into the drain in the floor, freshly spilled. It was so very real, the cross, the body, the crunch under his shoes, the scorched walls and ceilings. He knelt down, feeling the weight of the robe’s fabric in his hands as he gently turned the body over. Ice-blue eyes stared up at him, beneath the recesses of that weathered, kindly old face, but it was obvious they saw nothing, would never see again. He was too late. He was always too late, nightmares upon nightmares that had haunted him in his youth had played out just like this. If he hadn’t gone for that mobile suit, if he had been a little faster. He closed his eyes against the sight of Father Maxwell’s dead, bloodied face. His damn fault. A death that had spawned a thousand more from the cockpit of a great mechanical behemoth. That had awakened a being of pure destruction within him, who would have gleefully gone on killing and killing as long as the war could provide it lives to take. He had sown the seeds of it all right here, in the scorched remains of the Maxwell church, lying on his knees in the dirt with murky blood caking into his clothes.  
  
He opened his eyes and saw that the gentle features of Father Maxwell’s face had shifted, and the look he now leveled at Duo was one of pure accusatory malice. That dead, icy glare was trained right on him, contorted in anger. He knew. He knew that he and Sister Helen and all the innocent children of the orphanage were dead because of Duo. His lifeless mouth was curled in a grimace of absolute hatred. Goddamn worthless street rat, stinking filthy criminal stray. This is what you got when you showed a creature like that kindness. Give back that cross, you don’t deserve it. It was never meant for you, monster. Grave-robbing murderer. Stealing a necklace off the body of a dead priest, wearing his clothes, like that could ever bring you absolution. There is no absolution for this. This is your fault.   
  
Duo staggered back from the body, momentarily knocked off-balance and stumbling, scrambling to stand. His heart raced like a bomb ticking frantically toward explosion. The words hung unsaid in the air, bleeding silently down the walls of his mind, but Father Maxwell’s vision tracked him all the way, vengeful and seething. He took a few shaky steps backward, ashes and brick crunching under his shoes, certain for a moment that he would vomit. Father Maxwell stared hatefully at him.  
  
I’m sorry. The words sounded pathetic even in his own mind. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know they would attack the church. I was tricked, I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.  
  
It didn’t matter if he was sorry, they had paid the price anyway. He hadn’t known? Then he was stupid as well as guilty. No, no. He was a child, he’d never even shot a gun before. He was a thief and an illiterate wretch, but not a murderer. No. They were asking too much, too much, if he had the skills of a Gundam pilot in those days, he could have done something, but not then, not so young...   
  
He was pleading to a dead man. To a shadow of a memory. His fingers closed again around the tiny gold cross. It was a gift... wasn’t it? Weren’t the clothes gifts, too? Why couldn’t he remember? He hadn’t looted the bodies, no, never, he would never have done that. Not to his loved ones. Not to them. But he couldn’t remember, and the longer the dead eyes of Father Maxwell glared knowingly at him, he couldn’t be sure what was memory... and what he had only convinced himself was true.  
  
Suddenly, he heard a faraway explosion-- the sound of glass shattering somewhere. It brought him reeling back to the present, the tatters of his mind hastily gathering their bearings, reminding him of where he really was.   
  
Aboard the Persephone Four. Not the churchyard. A ship.  
  
An explosion...  
  
“Heero,” he breathed. Heero was close. He had to find him. There was no time to waste on anything else.  
  
Rubbery legs steadied themselves now, fingers tightened around his gun, and he bolted for the door and away from Father Maxwell and the smell of fire and guilt.  
  
* * * *  
  
“Hello?”  
  
There was no response beyond the quiet, helpless crying. The room was quite dark, and even he was having trouble locating the source of those sobs in the murky shadows. He fumbled for the wall beside the door and felt the smooth, protruding shape of a switch pass under his fingers, flicking it on to find, with a little surprise, that it actually worked. A bare bulb, suspended limply from the low ceiling by a twisted plastic cord, illuminated the room with a weak, flickering yellow gleam. It wasn’t much, but least he could see.   
  
He did, indeed, appear to be standing in a storage room, though why it was unmarked on the map was anyone’s guess. The floor was strewn with newspapers and shells of cardboard boxes, stacked upon each other into large columns that listed as if they might topple over any minute. Beneath the paper, the floor was dirty like that of the infirmary, but seemingly stable, missing the open, gaping holes of the corridor. He saw now, under the dim light, that the room was larger than he thought, an extension leading off to the right rendering it vaguely T-shaped. Stacks of boxes prevented him from seeing down into that area. Was that where the crying was coming from?  
  
“Duo?” Heero called, taking a few steps forward into the room. The door closed with a muted  _click_  behind him, but he paid it little notice, focused on the sound of ceaseless crying echoing off the walls. Whoever was in here with him seemed not to care that they were no longer alone. The sobs lilted, slightly high-pitched, oddly melodic in spite of the utter despondence they conveyed.   
  
His analytical mind hated what he was doing, rushing into an unknown situation like this, on the off chance that it might be Duo in this room.   
  
It didn’t  _sound_  like Duo, his mind supplied. Duo never cried. In all the years he’d known him, he’d never cried.  
  
What if it wasn’t him? What if it was someone else, or some _thing_?  
  
He would deal with that contingency if he needed to, he told himself, walking slowly towards the source of the sobbing, careful not to overturn any of the precarious stacks of newspaper. What  _was_  all this newspaper doing here?  
  
He didn’t care to know. He was here to find Duo, and get off the ship. That meant that he would investigate this room, in case Duo was here. Besides, if something had happened to Duo that could make him cry like that... well, he had to find out.  
  
The bleak yellow of the light above washed everything around him in a sickly hue, the newspapers looking old and rotted. Indeed, the room had an uncomfortable, mildewy smell to it, and the cardboard boxes strewn around flattened with a moist squelch when he stepped over them. The air hung, humid and stale. It was as if the uninterrupted sobs had mixed with the atmosphere, dampening it, clogging it down. He could feel clammy sweat begin to form in beads on his forehead.  
  
Stop thinking so much, he told himself, calm down, and do what you came to do. Once, he might have been able to will himself not to sweat, will the endorphins to leave his system, but that kind of training took constant upkeep to maintain. Life after the war, even as a Preventer, didn’t require that he stay that... supernatural. He was still strong, his attributes still enhanced, but he was aware that quite a lot about him had changed. His strength might have been the only thing that hadn’t, actually.   
  
Some of it was conscious effort, some of it was the natural result of his friendships with the other pilots, his increasingly intimate relationship with Duo in particular, but most of it was simply time. The last few years had afforded him that precious gift, that chance to learn how to be a human being, to begin to understand that his life mattered, and was worth protecting, not just the people he cared about within it. True, he wasn’t quite there yet. Maybe he’d never be. Maybe this was actually what normal people went through, too, learning to become that version of themselves that they had only barely imagined they ever could be. In his case, he’d never thought he’d get the chance. He hadn’t thought he had even deserved it.  
  
Heero continued towards the T-shaped extension in the room even as his thoughts ran away from him. The crying continued unabated, the occasional racking, shuddering inhale of breath its only pause. As he approached the turn, he lifted his gun. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end, he noticed. Odd. Just what was he expecting to find around the other side?  
  
Heero stepped past the wall and turned. Here, the light was dim, the edges of the room sunken in shadow, only approaching corporeal form where he stood. The boxes on the floor sat open, incongruous odds and ends spilling out of them. Dishes, tiny little clothes, a small television, coloring books. Perched atop one box, round little beaded eyes turned on him, was a teddy bear.  
  
And in the corner of the room, barely visible in the weak light, was the hunched form of a crying little girl.  
  
Heero inhaled sharply as several thoughts fought for precedence in his mind: it wasn’t Duo in the room. It was a  _child_. What was she doing here?  
  
She continued to cry, little shoulders shaking with her sobs.  
  
“What’s wrong?” He found himself asking.  
  
The little girl sniffed and her wailing came to a shuddering stop, though her shaky breaths made it sound as if she might begin again any second. He could see a thin little hand reach up to wipe futilely at her eyes.   
  
“She’s dead,” she said, in a tiny, wavering voice. Her voice was high and sweet, even in sorrow.   
  
“Who’s dead?”  
  
“My dog,” she sniffed. “My Mary.”  
  
Mary?  
  
He felt a strange twist in his chest. That name sounded so familiar to him. Mary...  
  
“Are you lost?”  
  
“Huh?” He said, but the girl didn’t respond. Had she said that out loud, or had he imagined it?  
  
Remembered it?  
  
Mary... that little dog in the park... that little dog... And the girl, the girl was...  
  
The little girl stood up then, still sniffling quietly. He could see that on the ground in front of her was the brown puppy’s little body, lifeless. The top of the child’s little blond head hung in shadow as she turned to face him, obscuring her expression.  
  
She had once worn a lovely little cotton sundress, he remembered, but if she wore the same dress now, it was barely recognizable. Covered in soot and filth, one sleeve ripped ragged at the shoulder, it hung rumpled from her tiny frame, tattered around her knees. A dark smear stained the front.  
  
“She’s dead,” the girl repeated, taking a few shaky steps toward him. “She’s dead.”  
  
“I know,” he tried to say, but his voice choked in his throat. The girl stepped toward him again.  
  
“Mary’s dead.” Another trembling step, and she began to take form under the light. He could see now that the smear on her dress was a deep, arterial red.  
  
“I’m sorry.” His voice was a whisper, his horrified eyes wide.  
  
“Dead... dead... dead...”  
  
He looked down at the ground as her tiny bare feet came into view, and for the first time noticed the headlines of the newspapers on the floor, every single one of them dated to the same day.  
  
 _August 11, 194  
  
Terrorist Attack Leaves Hundreds Dead in Apartment Collapse_  
  
The girl was in the light now. One arm hung the wrong way, elbow bent backwards, something broken, too, at the bicep. A fierce gash in her leg exposed the white of the bone beneath, skin gaping open, shredded into flaps. One blue eye, wet and bloodshot with tears, focused on him, but the other was gone, the whole side of her head gone, crushed inward into fragments like a broken egg shell, gore seeping around the edges of skull and bone matter and running down the side of her ruined face.  
  
His breath hitched, his guts lurched into his throat, and he staggered backwards, nerveless fingers dropping his gun to the floor with a clatter.   
  
No. No. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.  
  
The girl continued forward, her blue eye staring him icily down.  
  
“Your fault,” she said softly.  
  
He knew it was his fault. In every single one of the countless nightmares he had dreamed of that mission, he had confirmed it again and again. Every time his mind replayed that vision of the Leo groaning backwards into that building, every time he heard anew the roar of crumbling brick and concrete, every time he discovered once again the tiny, limp body of that little puppy, he knew. They had trained the kindness and compassion out of him, but they could never manage to snuff the guilt that wrapped around his brain and seeped into his nervous system, gripped his heart. It was his fault. This girl, the first of countless innocents, lost due to his ignorance and fucking stupid hubris, his petty, egotistical miscalculations. After he killed the pacifists, he had gone to the home of every next of kin and offered them retribution, offered them his own life in return, worthless in comparison though it was. But he had never gotten the chance to offer this little girl the same, for he had murdered every person she knew and loved the day she died, crushed just as surely around her in the rubble of her home. She had received nothing in return for his inexcusable cruelty.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he choked out, and found himself blocked by the wall from any further escape. She walked toward him, slowly, unhurriedly, smiling mirthlessly at him, unmindful of the terrible empty hole in her head. “I’m so sorry.”  
  
Every stack of newspaper around him suddenly collapsed in a great roaring tidal wave, rushing around the girl and pooling in the space between them.  _August 11, 194. Terrorist Attack. Hundreds Dead._  She stepped over the words, her gaze never wavering.  
  
“You did it... it’s your fault...”  
  
His knees buckled beneath him and he slid to the floor. “I’m sorry.”  
  
She stepped closer, closer, and stretched out both arms, the broken one protesting with a sickening crunch of sliding bone. Her dead, bloodied fingers curled, reaching for him.  
  
How presumptuous of him to think that he deserved his comfortable, happy life, that he deserved to live out his days in peace. How egotistical. Once again, a stupid miscalculation, based on nothing but his own hubris. He had so many debts left unpaid, so many lives he had taken. Why had he thought he could run from them forever? As if he could outrun the knowledge of what he had done, the guilt.  
  
She was going to kill him, he knew, when she reached him. Those hands would be surprisingly strong as they curled around his neck and crushed his windpipe. And he wouldn’t stop her. This is what he deserved. This is what he owed her.  
  
“Your fault... your fault...”  
  
The girl was very close now, and he slid his eyes closed, nearly deafened by the blood rushing frantically through his ears, pumped by his panicking heart. He wouldn’t run. He deserved this. Tiny fingers reached his neck, roughened with blood, looking for purchase before they began to clamp down. He deserved this.   
  
A staccato of piercing gunshots suddenly rang out, and he felt the tightening grip of the fingers around his neck relax instantly and fall away. His eyes shot open just in time to watch the form of the girl melt away in a blazing hiss of black smoke.  
  
Standing in the open door was Duo. Pocketing his gun, he rushed over, eyes wide with worry and disbelief.  
  
“Heero! What the fuck was that? What the hell were you doing on the floor?”  
  
Heero brought a hand up to his neck, felt the place where the girl’s hands had been before she’d... disappeared.  
  
“Duo,” he mumbled, his voice shaking dangerously. His eyes suddenly stung and blinked them rapidly. What had happened just now?  
  
“What’s wrong with you!?” Duo shouted, worry badly concealed with anger. “That fucking thing was about to kill you and you don’t even  _move_?”  
  
“Thing?” Heero repeated, heart thumping. “What... did it look like?”  
  
“Like that ugly bastard from before!” Duo hissed, looking around for Heero’s gun and moving to grab it off the floor. He turned to return it to him and paused, eyes narrowing in sudden comprehension.   
  
“Wait, what did  _you_  see?”  
  
Heero looked at him, and something in his expression made Duo’s soften.  
  
“Never mind, you don’t have to tell me.”   
  
He handed the gun over and watched Heero stow it before reaching out a hand to pull him to his feet. Once standing, Duo didn’t relinquish his hand, but drew him instead into a tight embrace, his arms wrapping around Heero’s shoulders, pulling him close without protest.  
  
“Thank God I found you in time,” Duo whispered against his cheek. Heero’s heart pounded wildly in his chest, and he found himself unable to respond, managing only to cling to the fabric of Duo’s jacket while his thoughts swirled in a horrible storm of regret, confusion... and fear.   
  
Those emotions, that masochistic desire for retribution for his sins... Christ, he hadn’t felt that way since the war. He’d thought he’d finally conquered them, thought he’d finally begun to feel differently... but maybe he had just stowed them away, deep down where they made themselves known only in memory, waiting for a chance to be called to the surface again. He had been ready to sacrifice himself. He had almost... lost this.  
  
Duo seemed to sense the turmoil because he tightened his grip around Heero’s shoulders and held him fast, until his breathing began to even and the shock and immediacy had bled away, until his heartbeat synced with Duo’s, a gallop slowing to a cantor slowing to a walk. When Duo released him, Heero felt much steadier on his feet.  
  
“The ship is changing again,” Duo said, when they had broken apart.  
  
Indeed, the room was shifting around them, the filth on the walls and floors receding out under the door with a strange, crackling, guttural hiss, leaving behind that muted grey finish once again. The light seemed to brighten, the wet heat of the air lifting, evaporating with the cloying mildew stench. Heero looked down and saw that what had once been a slew of old, yellowed newspapers was now nothing more than reams of computer readouts, the boxes solidifying into filing cabinets and drawers.   
  
And the little girl and her dog were gone.  
  
Duo sighed. “Don’t know about you, but I’m willing to bet we’re gonna find ourselves in another part of the ship when we leave this room.”  
  
Heero felt his bearings begin to come back to him, those dark thoughts once again receding back into his mind, his subconscious. He had been so close to... Jesus... He had almost...  
  
He ran a shaky hand through his bangs and Duo caught the gesture.  
  
“You okay?”  
  
He shrugged. He wasn’t, but it wouldn’t do Duo any good to worry over him. They had to move on.  
  
“Let’s go,” he said, suddenly eager to put a great distance between himself and this room.  
  
* * * *  
  
The Persephone’s halls were grey and relatively clean again, nothing like the state they’d been in minutes ago. Duo was not surprised to see that he had been right; they were not in the hallway they had expected, halfway between the medical bay and Laboratory One, but somewhere entirely different in the ship.   
  
“Bingo,” he muttered.   
  
They found themselves at the terminal end of a long, empty corridor, which stretched out ahead of them before veering off to the left, its walls unmarked by any doors or landmarks to serve as orientation.   
  
“Where the hell are we?” He turned to Heero, who was staring blankly down the corridor, his hands balled into fists at his sides. “...Heero?”  
  
Heero turned that blank expression on him. “What?”  
  
Duo flinched. That monotone voice was making an unwelcome appearance. “Can you remember anywhere on the map that looked like this?”   
  
Heero shook his head, turning back down the corridor. “We’ll find a floor plan eventually.” He began to walk and Duo, grimacing, followed.  
  
Something had happened to him. Whatever he had seen in there had brought out something very dark in him, and he was using his old wartime defense mechanisms to try to deal with it, to keep from going crazy. Duo wouldn’t upset him any more by prying; besides, judging by that shit in the mess hall with Father Maxwell, he had a pretty good idea of what Heero might have experienced. Memories of the dead, brought to corporeal form. That overwhelming, crushing guilt. The kinds of things that both of them had hoped would lesson with time, brought screaming back into their lives, all the more powerful for having been momentarily suppressed.  
  
He was no longer so sure they were only hallucinations, if he had ever truly managed to convince himself of that in the first place. No, something on the ship, perhaps the Persephone itself, was drawing out their memories, amplifying them, giving them physical life. Memories which had the power to hurt them... destroy them.  
  
The ship wanted them separated, where they were vulnerable. It sounded crazy even to himself, but nothing about this place was anything except insane. The ship wanted  _them_. It had almost gotten Heero, and Duo had a bad feeling that it was angry at his interference in that effort, that it would seek retribution. It would come for him in revenge.   
  
Well, it would fucking have to try. What could it throw at him now? It had played its hand with Father Maxwell, and he’d survived that. Wasn’t it out of ideas? Or was this quiet, grey space merely a reprieve while it searched his brain, his subconscious, for nightmares to exploit?  
  
Part of Duo hoped, masochistically, that it  _would_  focus on him, that it would let Heero go now that he had aroused its ire. He would die, gladly and with a goddamn smile on his face, before he let the Persephone hurt Heero.  
  
“Say, Yuy,” he said now, walking beside him in the corridor.  
  
“Hm.”  
  
“What do you know about the research they were doing here?”  
  
Heero shrugged. “Not a lot. The mission brief said they were researching theoretical quantum mechanics-- exotic matter. Particles that don’t follow the normal properties of physics. As far as I know, they were working on matter that might be useful in the construction of traversable wormholes.”  
  
“Traversable? Like, ones you can go through?”   
  
Duo stopped in his tracks and Heero turned to look at him.  
  
“What?”  
  
“What would happen if one of their experiments went wrong? If they shot the wrong particles at each other, or something?”  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
“You said that they were working on wormholes. We are talking about time travel, right? Falling through dimensions and shit? If they were trying to create a wormhole you could travel through... Jesus.”  
  
Heero mulled it over with a frown. “Everything I’ve read about wormholes implies that no one has managed to create one except on a very small scale. No one has ever created one big enough to house a ship. Beyond just the physical aspects, no one knows what it would be like inside.”  
  
An alternate dimension. Christ.  
  
“Duo, we don’t know if that’s what happened here.” Heero was trying to calm him down.  
  
“Do you have any better theories? Any explanation for... shit,  _anything_  that’s been going on?”  
  
The ragged edge of his voice lessened some of the accusatory bite to the words. Heero just shook his head.  
  
“What happened to the crew?”  
  
“I don’t know. But they’re certainly not here.”  
  
“How do we get out?”  
  
Heero was silent for a moment as he thought about it. “A wormhole needs to be generated somehow, they don’t work on an infinite loop. We would have to find the source of the generation and shut it down. But...”  
  
“But what?”  
  
Heero frowned. For a second, he paused, and it was obvious that whatever he was going to say was not something Duo wanted to hear. “Well, no one has been inside of one before, so no one knows what would happen if you tried to destroy it while still in it. The wormhole might evaporate, leaving us where we began. Or it might collapse, leaving us inside.”  
  
“Great. Trapped in this nightmare forever.”   
  
Duo ran a hand through his bangs, considering the options. They could keep trying to find the exit, taking their chances with the Persephone’s whims. Duo couldn’t bring himself to hold much hope that it would allow them to just mosey out of there before it was done toying with them. That left the other option: they could try to kill it. Shut down the power to the whole damn ship. Stab it in its heart. Do it one back for everything it had done to them. Then, maybe, they would be free.  
  
Or maybe they would be stuck for good. But they were stuck right now, running in circles, waiting for the next attack, with no retaliation. It was only a matter of time until it would sound that alarm again, bringing the darkness crashing down around them. And then, when they woke up alone and separated again, maybe he wouldn’t be able to get to Heero in time...  
  
What other options did they have?  
  
Heero read Duo’s intentions like a book. “Duo,” he said, his monotone finally dropping away, his tone rising in warning. “This may not work. We may be entirely wrong.”  
  
Duo caught his gaze and held it. “I know.”  
  
“It may... it may get worse as we try to disable it.”  
  
“Oh, I’m sure it will.” He would just have to hope he was ready.   
  
Heero stared at him for a long time.  
  
“We’ll need oxygen if we’re going to shut the power down,” he said finally. “We have to find some first.”  
  
He was in this with him, whatever happened. Heero had his back. Despite it all, Duo felt a grin climb to his face.   
  
Maybe they weren’t powerless after all. Maybe the Persephone didn’t know just who the hell it was up against.  
  
“The captain’s quarters might have some,” he said, and Heero nodded.   
  
“Let’s find a floor map.”  
  
They set off back down the hall, now, at least, with some kind of purpose guiding them. Duo was already trying to form the plan of attack in his head. Go to the captain’s cabin and pilfer some oxygen tanks. The emergency generator system was probably in the lower level somewhere; they would have to head down there after to turn that bastard off. Then, hopefully, they’d be able to navigate the ship in decompression and escape.   
  
He’d just have to hope the ship decided to cooperate with them.  
  
They turned the corner and the hall before them branched off in several directions, immediately to their right, and then again up ahead, where it dead-ended perpendicular to another corridor. They stood, surveying the scene, no idea which direction to go. The place was a goddamn labyrinth.   
  
“There,” Heero said, and Duo followed his gaze to a floor map encased in glass on the wall, directly in the middle of the intersection ahead of them. They hurried over to it, peering through the glare of the fluorescent lights overhead to scan the neat lines of the drawings within the protective covering. Duo glanced down the hall on either side of him, locating a door far down to the left.  
  
“Looks like Laboratory Three down there,” he said.  
  
“Hm...” Heero scanned the map and tapped a finger to the glass. “We’re here.” He indicated a little scale illustration of the complicated intersection they were standing in and the long hallway they had come from.   
  
“We were in Computer Room One,” he read off the map.  
  
“Like hell we were,” Duo muttered.  
  
Heero’s finger followed the line of the hall beyond Laboratory Three, tracing it as it curved to the right, then continued straight past another intersection and a few offices, until dead-ending at the bridge, with the captain’s cabin indicated as a neat little box beside it.  
  
“There.”  
  
Duo nodded, memorizing the turns. Left, then right, and straight through the intersection, to the right of the bridge. Easy as fucking pie.  
  
“Let’s go,” he said, already turning on his heel, eager to get a move on.   
  
There was a shattering crash behind him and he whirled around, one hand already reaching for his gun. He found Heero nonchalantly reaching into the now-destroyed protective case for the map, surrounded by a million tiny pieces of broken glass on the floor around him. He turned to smirk at Duo’s wide-eyed expression.  
  
“I thought it might be useful,” he said.  
  
Duo burst into laughter, tinged more than a little by nerves.   
  
“What?”  
  
“Nothing, nothing,” Duo replied, when he had caught his breath. “You nearly gave me a heart attack there, Yuy. Ready now?”  
  
Heero nodded and walked over to him, pocketing the map.   
  
“That must’ve felt pretty damn good.”  
  
“Yeah, it did.”  
  
The dark shadow behind his eyes was almost gone, Duo noticed. Thank God. Whatever had happened in that room had shaken him, but not broken him. And as long as Duo was alive, he wouldn’t let the ship have a second chance at Heero.  
  
In the wake of his laughter, the air in the hall felt palpably still, silent except for their hollowly echoing footsteps. It was not a comfortable silence, not an easy quiet that settled between the two of them. They were not alone. He could feel the presence of the Persephone all around them, watching, biding its time. It brought his nerves to the edge of his skin, made him feel much too exposed under the cold glare of the ceiling lights.   
  
They approached the door for Laboratory Three and Duo imagined the corridor darkened slightly, dimming as they passed it. He spoke to cover up the quick uptake in his thumping heart.  
  
“What are inside these laboratories anyway? No Bunsen burners and petri dishes, right?”  
  
Heero, too, was glancing up at the ceiling toward the lights. Looks like it hadn’t been just his imagination. Shit. “It’s particle physics research. I would assume the laboratories are occupied entirely by ion colliders, and are observed remotely by computer.”  
  
“Ion colliders? I thought those things were huge machines.”  
  
“They are, usually. As far as I know, these are new models, meant to replicate the work of the larger machines on a much smaller scale.”  
  
“Looks like they replicated it in fucking spades, huh?”  
  
They were nearly at the first turn, a hard right, when they heard the unmistakable click of a door opening behind them and the muffled clatter of footsteps running down the hall. They whirled around just in time to see a thin, bare leg, shoeless, disappear down the corridor they had come from. The door to Laboratory Three was wide open.   
  
“I thought you said it was all machinery,” Duo muttered.  
  
“It is.” Heero glared at the open door. “There shouldn’t be room for anyone inside.”  
  
“You saw it too, right? Looked like a little kid. And without shoes, either.”   
  
Heero’s eyes were dark. “Did it... look like a girl?”  
  
“I, uh... couldn’t tell.” That haunted look in Heero’s eyes made him wish he had gotten a better look, made him feel a little guilty. “Sorry.”  
  
Heero peered down the hallway for a long moment, staring after the child, his expression threatening to wrench Duo’s heart right out of his chest. This goddamn ship. He suddenly wished he could just set the damn thing ablaze right there.  
  
Finally, Heero turned and gave him a tiny nod: let’s move on.   
  
They turned the corner, never once turning back to look for the child, to confirm what they had seen. The hallway here spanned wide, but the walls were the same stark grey emptiness. Far ahead of them, Duo could see the doors to the offices that had been indicated on the map, and the next intersection. Straight through that, and they’d be at the captain’s cabin.  
  
Duo walked, and waited, waited to see what ghost from the Maxwell Church the ship would decide to conjure up next. Sister Helen? Why not just trot out the whole convent while they were at it? God knew he had enough guilt to spare for all of them.   
  
Christ, he had to stop thinking or he’d give it ideas.   
  
The lights at the far end of the hall clicked off and he felt, more than heard, Heero go for his gun. Then, they flickered back on again, and Duo could see something had changed.  
  
“There’s writing on the wall now.”  
  
Heero grunted his acknowledgement and they continued-- what else could they do?-- toward the intersection, its grey walls now marred by a black scrawl Duo couldn’t make out from their distance.   
  
Another light ahead of them winked off and on and the floor was now dirty, lined with discarded bottles and cigarettes. The shadows of noise echoed off the walls, like the clamor of a busy street heard through the walls of a house.   
  
They walked right past the grime, ignoring the empty din of the nonexistent crowd. There was more brown to the walls than grey here, and more rust than even that. Beneath the trash, the floor was not tile anymore, but asphalt.   
  
The scrawling letters on the wall looked much less out of place now that the ship had updated the scenery to fit. It was graffiti on tin, a passing swipe of an aerosol paint can, tagged in haste, in darkness perhaps, by someone who may not have known how to write anything else. Gravity pulled the tips of the letters downward, dripping down the wall, not enough time to pretty it up, and no one who would care anyway. Black didn’t stand out so well on the dark tin, but for an artist who had to steal all his materials it was more about what you had on hand and taking advantage of fleeting opportunity than about the beauty of the end result. The words read:  _Ella Doesn’t Know_.  
  
Duo stared up at the words for a long time, amazed that he could still remember writing them once. He could feel Heero’s confused gaze on him and he turned to explain.  
  
“It’s a code.”  
  
Heero grunted. “And here I was going to ask if you knew anyone named ‘Ella’. What does it stand for?”  
  
“If you say ‘Ella Doesn’t’ fast it sounds like ‘L dos’, right? Lotta kids on L-2 spoke Spanish, so in slang it became ‘dos’, not ‘two’. The ‘Know’ is just something we threw in there because it sounded like our gang’s name, the Knucks. For ‘knucklers’... thieves. ‘Ella Doesn’t Know’: L-2 Knucks,” Duo said, guardedly watching the subtle changes in Heero’s expression.   
  
“You’ve never told me this before,” Heero said with some surprise.  
  
“I didn’t? Huh.” He was rather surprised himself.   
  
“You were in a street gang?”  
  
“Yeah, I was.”  
  
Goddamn worthless street rat, stinking filthy criminal stray!  
  
Father Maxwell’s angry, hateful glare came unbidden to his mind. That wasn’t real, he told himself, that was the ship fucking with him. It wasn’t real. Snap out of it. Worthless, thieving--  
  
“-- Duo?”   
  
Heero’s voice broke him out of his flashback. He ran a hand heavily over his face. “Shit. Sorry.”  
  
Heero was looking at him with concern, and Duo saw that while he had been lost in those horrible thoughts Heero had moved to put himself between the writing on the wall and Duo’s line of vision. He thought the words were painful for him to read, that the memories on display were the reason he was upset, not the memories in his head. Heero was trying, maybe unconsciously, to protect Duo from himself.  
  
Duo suddenly felt utterly exposed, his body clothed but his mind naked under his partner’s gaze, the two of them standing there surrounded by his deepest, oldest memories. Whatever the ship found after excavating his brain and sent shuddering out to greet him, Heero would see it too. He hadn’t told Heero a thing about his past, he realized now. He hadn’t wanted to. It made people look at you differently when they knew you had learned how to rob someone before you learned how to read. Or that your age had been in double digits when you’d first slept in a bed or combed your hair. He didn’t want Heero to look at him differently. God, of everyone, not Heero.  
  
Well, it looked like it was too fucking late for that now. Maybe the ship itself had pried those fears out of his brain, and slogging through the streets of L-2’s slums on their way to the captain’s cabin was the Persephone’s gleeful retaliation for Duo saving Heero from the thing in the computer room. And he couldn’t do a damn thing except grin and take it.  
  
He’d start with the grinning. “I’m okay, Heero, jeez,” he said, sounding like he was doing a pretty bad impression of ‘okay’, even to himself. Heero, also unconvinced, reached out a hand to place on Duo’s shoulder.   
  
He’d gotten really good at this, Duo realized, the way he knew how to touch him to get through his walls. Next, he’d give him that intense, disarming stare, that blue gaze prying the words right out of him as easily as if he was under hypnosis, and Duo would be telling him everything before he knew it, whether or not he even wanted to. And forget wanting to, right now he didn’t even know if he could handle it, here, in this awful place. Didn’t Heero understand that Duo was having a hard enough time keeping it together on his own?  
  
He turned away quickly before Heero’s hand could reach him. “Come on, let’s keep going,” he muttered.  
  
“Duo...”  
  
“You might be fine with no oxygen, Hercules, but we mere mortals need our equipment.” He strode off down the hall, and after a pause, he could hear Heero’s footsteps hurrying to catch up behind him. God, he was such an ass. If they made it out of here he’d be lucky if Heero ever spoke to him again.  
  
The air was hot and stale and carried that stink, that unforgettable smell, of tin and ramshackle tiling baking in the heat. The air on L-2 was always hot, the filtration systems always malfunctioning one way or another, and the tin shacks in the slums held that heat between them like furnaces, making the air in the narrower alleyways warp and tremble, hissing off the asphalt. People would throw blankets out on their roofs and sleep outside sometimes when it was really unbearable. They would try to peel them off in the morning and find that the blankets had melted into the tar.  
  
That was the tar smell stinging his nostrils now, following them down the hallway. There was no doubt, they were in the slums, the Tin City. Some of their rivals lived in the Tin City, had families not yet decimated by war. The plague had yet to come. Those kids stole for their parents, who begged during the day in the gardens and parks on the nice side of town, and at night they would all return home to their cobbled-together houses and pool their caches.   
  
The Knucks were orphans, though, every last one of them, and their home was in the border between the slum and the nicer part of town, an area that had once been known as the Atlas District, back in the colony’s early days, but was known to them as the Wasteland, or the Cemetery, or the Dead End, because every brick-faced apartment building in it was condemned and empty, windows blown out or boarded up, with doorless entrances that yawned like open graves, abandoned to rot by the richer folk who couldn’t bear to live beside the encroaching misery of the slums. The L-2 Knucks hid out in those apartments like a little colony of mice, in whichever one was safest or warmest, and tagged their location so they could find it again--  _Ella Doesn’t Know_.   
  
“Hey Kid!”   
  
Duo stopped in his tracks. God damn it. Wasn’t Father Maxwell enough?   
  
Heero stopped too, and the widening of his eyes told Duo that he’d also heard it.   
  
“Hey, ain’t you got a name?”  
  
The saliva dried right out of his mouth, his throat. His chest tightened around his heart, and he could feel the sweat on his forehead, his palms.  
  
“If you’re going to stay with us, you need a name. We gotta call you  _something_.”  
  
Duo’s feet remembered how to move and he took off for the cabin, leaving Heero momentarily stunned behind him.   
  
“Hey!” Heero called out, running to catch up, but Duo wasn’t running from him, he was running from himself, running from memories. He could see the door ahead of them, right where the map had said it would be. The sign over it said as much:  _Captain’s Quarters_. A line had been drawn through the “Captain”, and even as he approached, crooked black letters were appearing over the crossed-out word. It would say “Boss’s Quarters”, because Solo called himself the Knucks’s Boss, not their Captain, and that’s where they were, they were in Solo’s town, leaving the Tin City and heading right for the Wasteland. He ran, as if he could possibly outrun the ship.  
  
“How about Duo? ‘Cause I’m Solo, right? You could be my partner. My right hand man. You even know what that means? It means you have to follow me wherever I go! Got it?”  
  
“Duo!” Someone yelled, and Duo couldn’t immediately tell if it was Heero... or Solo.  
  
Then he was at the door, swinging it open, and moving to shut it rapidly behind him. Something heavy and strong hit the other side and there was a brief struggle, Duo trying to shut the door, while whatever was on the other side pushed back with all its might. Gritting his teeth and digging his heels into the ground, Duo heaved against it.  
  
“Duo! It’s me! Open the fucking door!” came Heero’s voice from the other side, strained with effort and desperation.  
  
“Heero?” Duo stopped, and the door swung open with enough force to send him flying back into the wall. His head hit with a painful thump and he nearly fell from the shock of it, of how hard he had been fighting Heero. Why had he been trying to shut Heero out?  
  
Heero flew through the door and slammed it angrily behind him, dark eyes wild as he came at Duo.   
  
“What the hell was that about?”  
  
“I... don’t know.”  
  
“Why the hell were you trying to leave me out there?”  
  
He hadn’t been, had he? He been running away from something. Or to it. He didn’t know anymore.   
  
“I don’t know...”  
  
“God damn it, Duo!” Heero shouted, reaching for him, and Duo flinched, for a moment thinking he was about to get hit. But instead, Heero’s arms came around him, holding him tight enough to hurt, knocking them both backward into the wall, but Heero’s hand was at the back of Duo’s head to soften the blow. And then Heero was kissing him, fiercely, painfully, pushing him up against the wall, and Duo let his eyes slide closed and his hands come up to grab desperately at Heero’s jacket and it was like he could think again, could breathe again, and for a moment his heart untangled and none of the insanity around them existed, it was just him and Heero together.  
  
Heero broke the kiss to pull Duo even tighter against him, and whispered hoarsely against his ear, “don’t ever run away from me again, Duo. Please.”  
  
Duo nodded, not even sure if Heero could tell, but he didn’t trust his voice to speak.   
  
But maybe he could tell, because when Heero pulled away, he no longer had that wild, panicked look in his eyes.  
  
“Where are we?” He said at length, finally taking a look around the cabin.  
  
The room was nothing like the cabin of a ship, not anymore. What had most likely been a concrete floor had to turned to wood, but the planks were sagging and rotted through with mildew, cracked in places, stained with decay. The space was small and the air huddled close around them, wet, stinking not with tar but with rot. Along one wall was a faded set of drawers and a narrow, warped bed frame, a yellowed mattress hanging partly off of it, stabbed through with exposed springs. Shards of broken glass, torn, soggy newspaper, and other detritus collected in the corners of the room. At one far end was a closet, an overturned table shoved up against the door. A lamp lit the room at that end, though in the confusion, no one had turned it on.  
  
“We’re too late,” Duo said.   
  
Heero stared at him. “Do you know where we are?”  
  
Duo nodded, his heart in his throat. He walked over to the dresser and sat heavily down upon it, running both hands over his face. He opened his eyes again, but the room hadn’t changed. He hadn’t really expected it to, anyway.   
  
“Duo, what’s going on? Where are we?”  
  
“I... used to live here.”  
  
“What?”  
  
Duo could feel Heero’s gaze still on him, and he looked away, eyes focusing on the springs breaking through the soft fabric of the mattress, like bones jutting from a body.  
  
“This is the first place I can remember from when I was a kid,” he said at length. “Looked just like this, glass and trash and all.”  
  
“Jesus.” Heero took another look around the room, another look around at Duo’s past, and shook his head. Yeah, it wasn’t a pretty sight, was it, Yuy?   
  
“Duo,” he began again, “was that... was that how you got your name?”  
  
The voice in the hall. Solo.   
  
“Yeah.”   
  
Duo finally pulled his gaze back toward Heero and found him watching him with an unreadable expression.  
  
“Who was that?”  
  
“The Knucks’ boss. He took care of us.”   
  
Heero’s eyes were dark. “Did he... did he do something?”  
  
Duo’s heart thudded a quick beat.   
  
“What are you talking about?”  
  
“You ran for your life when you heard his voice.”  
  
“I... don’t know why I did that. I just... panicked, I guess.”  
  
“How come?” Heero’s gaze refused to leave his. God, there he went again, trying to force the words out of him through a look. Trying to pry him open like a goddamn oyster.  
  
“Maybe because he’s been dead ten years? Maybe because I don’t like hearing my fucking ghosts talking to me out loud? I don’t know, Heero, Christ!”  
  
He could see the words process in Heero’s brain, saw the minute widening of his eyes at the word ‘dead’, and finally that searching stare broke and Heero looked away, eyes going to the door and then to the ground.  
  
“What happened?”  
  
“He got sick,” Duo said, and nothing more.  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
“Is the interrogation over now, Yuy?”  
  
“Duo, I just wanted to--”  
  
“What, Heero? Just wanted to know all the shit that’s fucked me up over the years? You want to know about my nightmares, Heero? Take a fucking look around, you’re knee-deep in ‘em.”  
  
Heero’s hands balled into fists at his sides. He stared at the floor, shoulders trembling slightly, his mouth a thin, pressed line. Duo could feel the hard pumping of his own heart, the blood rushing in his ears, and he dug his fingers into the musty wood of the dresser beneath him to keep his hands from shaking.  
  
For a minute, no one spoke, the only sound in the room the sagging creak of the floorboards.  
  
“That thing you shot, before, in the computer room,” Heero began, his voice so low it was almost inaudible. “I didn’t see a  _thing_. I saw... a little girl. A girl I killed, a year before Operation Meteor. I didn’t do it on purpose, it was an accident. But it was my fault.”  
  
He turned his head slightly, glancing at Duo and then away. “There... now you know what my nightmares are about, too.”  
  
“Heero...”  
  
“If we aren’t in this together, Duo, we aren’t going to make it out of here.”  
  
Duo’s mouth opened, and closed again. “You’re right,” he said finally. Pushing himself off the dresser, he went to stand in front of Heero, who slowly lifted his eyes to look at him.  
  
“That nightmare I had on the ship on the way here... I dreamt I was sitting next to Solo’s body again, the way it had looked after he died. He got sick, and I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t do anything.”  
  
“Duo...” Heero’s eyes were wide, his gaze somewhere over Duo’s shoulder.  
  
“I should’ve told you before. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Heero, I feel like I’m going crazy.”  
  
“Duo, look.”  
  
“What is it?” Duo turned to see what Heero was staring at.  
  
On the wall behind the bed, giant, dripping red letters had splashed themselves across the space that had been bare moments before:  
  
 _Liar!!_  
  
“What the fuck?”  
  
“You were talking about your nightmare, and they just appeared.” Heero’s voice was a hoarse whisper.  
  
“I didn’t lie!” Duo said, voice rising dangerously. “I didn’t fucking lie!”  
  
A hundred little red letters began to draw themselves on the wall, jagged and uneven, the words forming sporadically, over and over, furious and accusatory.  
  
 _Liar! Liar!! Liar Liar liar liarliarliar liar liar LIAR!_  
  
“Fuck you!” Duo shouted. “I am not a fucking liar!”  
  
Words drew themselves over words, bleeding into one another.  
  
 _You know what you did YOU KNOW YOU KNOW_  
  
“What the fuck do you want from me!? Huh!? What do you  _want_!?”  
  
“Duo, stop!”  
  
“Get out of my fucking head! Filthy, worthless, stinking--”  
  
“DUO!”  
  
In an instant, the bleeding words vanished, the wall stark and whole again.   
  
“Duo... Are you okay?”  
  
Duo stared up at the empty wall and shook his head.   
  
“It’s the ship, it’s trying to break you. Don’t listen to it.”  
  
“What did it mean... ‘you know what you did’?”  
  
“Nothing, Duo. It didn’t mean anything. Don’t let it have any power over you.”  
  
“It called me a liar. I told you I sat beside Solo’s body after he died of the plague... and it called me a liar.”  
  
“Duo, you have to stop! We have to--”  
  
“Take a look around, Heero. We’re in a condemned apartment building on L-2... built out of my head. There aren’t going to be any oxygen canisters here. We can’t outsmart the ship. It’s never going to let us walk out of here.”  
  
“You’re just going to give up!?”  
  
“We have to play its game. It isn’t giving us a choice. We have to do what it wants.”  
  
“Duo, it  _wants_  to  _kill_  us!”  
  
Duo turned away from the wall, and looked at Heero then, and the expression on his partner’s face nearly tore Duo’s heart in two. He looked like he might break down any moment. And it was his fault. Another thing, on a list of many, that he was to blame for.   
  
“I won’t let it hurt you,” Duo said finally, an oath. A promise he’d keep with his life.   
  
Heero’s voice was a shaking whisper. “If it hurts you, it hurts me.”  
  
“Then I guess you’ll have to watch my ass, huh?”  
  
Duo let his hand slide off Heero’s shoulder, down his arm, and close around Heero’s. For a moment, they just looked at each other, letting that one touch speak for them. Then, Heero nodded.  
  
“All right. Let’s go.”   
  
With that, Duo turned and headed for the door, though for a moment he couldn’t see it, his eyes were blurred and wet, but only for a moment, and then he turned the handle, and they were gone.


	3. Chapter 3

The hall outside the cabin had transformed completely into the abandoned building where Duo had said he’d once lived. The damp dark wood of the walls and floor creaked and popped, buckling in protest against the nails that strained to keep them from warping. That there was wood at all spoke to how old the building must have been when Duo had lived there; wood was used heavily in the oldest buildings on the colonies, when the world economy supported them and trade between space and Earth had been free and cheap. Political tensions had dried up the flow of natural resources from Earth quickly, long before either of them had been born; all the buildings Heero could remember from his youth were concrete. But this ancient apartment, with its wood-finished interior, still spoke of L-2’s once rich and luxuriant past, now left to destitution and decay.   
  
They walked vaguely in the direction of the main control room, though what state it was in now was anyone’s guess. And what would be waiting for them there? Did Duo have any idea? If he did, he wasn’t sharing. He wasn’t speaking at all, walking several steps ahead, not looking around, hands deep in pockets. Heero fought back the urge to reach for him, hold him, do  _something_  for him.   
  
And what the hell  _could_  he do? He asked himself bitterly. Not a damn thing. They were at the mercy of the ship now, wandering deeper into its maze, two little mice scurrying blindly toward a certain trap. Anxiety hummed along his skin, the groans of the floorboards making him flinch, senses frayed by the sheer  _wrongness_  of the place.   
  
There was another hallway ahead, splitting off two ways, and Heero pulled out the floor map that he had taken from the glass case earlier. If they were still standing in the Persephone’s halls, there would be a laboratory down on the right, and more offices, with the control room at the opposite end. He glared down one shadowed hallway, straining to see, but could make out no doors that corresponded with the floor plan. Damn. He had almost been hoping the map had changed with the rest of the ship. Now, it was just useless. With a frustrated grunt, he pocketed the paper.  
  
Duo paused at the intersection, peering down both corridors. “This way,” he said, turning to the left. Heero followed, though he couldn’t guess how Duo had chosen. Perhaps it was something he remembered from his past.  
  
There was no light anymore. Heero thought he could see light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, but a building this decrepit surely had no electricity running to power them. The hall sank into heavy blackness ahead, the faded outlines of flowers on the remaining scraps of wallpaper only visible when standing directly beside them-- no, not flowers, he realized with a start. Faces. They were little faces, mouths open and wailing. Heero wrenched his gaze away and refused to look again.  
  
He followed Duo around another corner, barely able to make him out in the darkness, and when he stopped abruptly short in the hall, Heero almost barrelled right into him.  
  
“What?” He hissed, his whispered voice as loud as a shout in the empty hallway.  
  
“There’s something written here,” Duo muttered, peering up at the wall on their right.  
  
Heero followed his gaze, and could see that between the horrible faces of the wallpaper, the tendrils of black mold staining the wood, someone had scratched a message in the wall with a knife or some other sharp object, the long, jagged edges of the letters gaping like open wounds.   
  
 _Do you remember yet? Oh you will you will_  
  
Duo cursed under his breath. Heero turned to him, but before he could speak, Duo just shook his head.  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
“Duo...”  
  
“I’m telling you, Heero, I don’t know what it’s talking about.”  
  
“I believe you.”  
  
Neither of them sounded very convincing. Heero  _did_  believe him-- he had to. That didn’t change the fact that the Persephone wanted to show them something, something that Duo had apparently forgotten. Heero thought again of the look in Duo’s eyes when he’d heard that voice in the hall, that boy who had called himself Solo. Heero himself had held a gun to Duo’s head once, and even then, he had never seen him look so terrified.   
  
He couldn’t tell Duo, but that more than anything had convinced him that maybe the ship knew something Duo didn’t, had pulled something out of his memory that Duo had stowed far from his own conscious mind. There was more to that story than Duo could recall, more than just an illness. That nightmare on the ship, before they had even arrived at this god-forsaken place, that refusal to talk about it at all, suggested as much.  
  
What had happened to him?  
  
They continued down the dark corridor until they came to another intersection, and, lost, Heero waited for Duo to decide their next move. He peered down one way, then the other, his eyes shadowed. For a moment, it seemed he couldn’t decide.  
  
“Duo?”   
  
Duo whirled to look at him, but Heero shook his head. He hadn’t spoken.  
  
“Duo!”  
  
They turned in the direction of the voice, a frail, echoing rasp, ringing from the pitch blackness at one end of the hallway.   
  
“Come on, I wanna show you something.”  
  
“Solo?” Heero whispered. At his side, Duo gave one curt nod, his mouth tight.  
  
“What are you doin’ up? You’re sick!” A second voice rang down the hallway, this one younger, brighter. Heero’s breath caught. It was a child’s voice, but one he recognized instantly.  
  
“I’m feelin’ better today.” There was a ghost of a cough that belied the bravado of the words. “Come on, kid.”  
  
“Only if you promise to get back in bed!” The child Duo once was scolded.  
  
An echoing laugh followed. “I promise, all right? Sheesh.”  
  
Something like a moan escaped Duo beside him. Heero turned and saw that Duo’s arms were wrapped around himself, that he was hunched over strangely, as if hearing the exchange had hurt him. Heero’s hand reached for that bowed shoulder before he could stop himself.  
  
“Duo?”   
  
At the contact, Duo flinched and straightened. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”  
  
“We don’t have to do this.”  
  
“Yeah, we do,” Duo muttered. “Come on.”  
  
He set off in the direction of the voices and Heero followed before he lost him in the darkness. This was wrong. It was all wrong. They were blindly walking toward something terrible, he knew somehow. He felt it with every fiber of his being. Couldn’t Duo feel it too? Or was he already resigned to his fate? Solo was calling to him, from the depths of his memory. And Duo was going to him, getting farther and farther from Heero, slipping away. The thought clawed at his heart, made his breath catch. He feared he would lose him here.   
  
The halls were dark as midnight now, even the moaning faces on the walls impossible to make out. Their footsteps sounded louder in his ears in the absence of vision, the sogging wood on the floor seemed wetter, fleshier. His shoes stuck, like trudging through something viscous and heavy, and he pulled each step away with a thick sucking slurp. The smell, too, seemed to take shape around them, mildew mixing with sweat and phlegm and the heady stink of disease. Sickness hovered in the air.   
  
A door slammed ahead of them, and they both inhaled sharply with surprise. Heero found his gun at his side and closed his fingers around the grip, but it was almost useless, blind as he was in this enveloping darkness. They continued to walk, silent as death, straining to hear the sound of someone else’s breathing join theirs, the squelch of another’s footsteps in the stinking corridor, each second of each endless minute pounded out by Heero’s shuddering heartbeat. Finally, they came to the wall, a dead end.  
  
“I found the door handle,” Duo said.   
  
Heero put his hands out to feel the wall himself, finding it wet and warm, and his fingers traced over dripping, fleshy curvature-- was this wood anymore?-- until he felt Duo’s hand beneath his, smooth and familiar, and beneath that, a cold, rounded doorknob. He felt Duo’s fingers turn under his, felt the knob turn partway and abruptly stop as the lock halted its motion. It wouldn’t open. He wasn’t sure if he was panicked or relieved.   
  
Duo exhaled with frustration. “How the hell do we open this?”  
  
“I don’t know.” Maybe we shouldn’t, he added in his mind. Hell, we  _definitely_  shouldn’t.  
  
“Solo said he wanted to show me something.”  
  
“What was it?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Duo whispered. “I don’t remember that conversation at all.”  
  
“Then maybe it didn’t happen.”  
  
“I... I don’t know anymore. Maybe I forgot it. I don’t remember Solo ever getting better. Just sicker.”   
  
“Then it wasn’t real, right?”  
  
Duo took a shuddering, shaking breath.   
  
“I don’t know what’s real and what’s not anymore. I think... I think I need to know what he wanted to show me.”  
  
“Duo...”  
  
“Stay with me, okay?” Duo said suddenly. “As long as you’re here... it can’t hurt me.”  
  
It’s already hurting you, Heero wanted to respond. Instead, he tightened his hand around Duo’s on the doorknob and said, “of course.”  
  
“Uh, listen, Heero... in case I don’t get another chance to say it... I... I lo--”  
  
“Stop,” Heero interrupted, and heard Duo’s breath catch. He turned to where he knew his partner to be standing, though he could see nothing in the darkness.   
  
“Not here. Not in this place. Save it for when we’re home.”  
  
“Heero--”  
  
“Just... just make sure you have another chance to say it, okay?”  
  
Duo was silent for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice was tellingly hoarse. “Okay.”  
  
“Me too,” Heero blurted. “So... give me another chance to say it, too.”  
  
He heard another sharp inhale of breath, covered up badly by a cough. A minute passed before Duo composed himself again to speak.  
  
“I will.”  
  
“Okay.”   
  
Duo pulled his hand gently out from under Heero’s, sliding it off the doorknob. Heero gave the door another experimental turn, but it was still locked, and he, too, let go. They stood, together in the darkness, surrounded by moist, diseased air and the vaguest movement of the pulsing walls. Finally, Duo spoke.  
  
“Solo?”  
  
If he was waiting for a response, it didn’t come.  
  
“Solo,” he repeated, “it’s Duo. You said you had somethin’ to show me. Well, lemme in.”  
  
With a low, sucking hum, the door swung outward and open, the knob turning under its own power, the lock disengaging itself with a minute  _click_. Before them was a staircase, and at the end of the stairs was another door, heavy and rusted, meekly lit overhead with a pale, red light. A basement? The Persephone had no rooms pertaining to this, but he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised about that anymore.  
  
They followed the stairs down, neither of them reacting when the door behind them inevitably slammed shut. The one in front of them opened easily, and they walked through without hesitation.  
  
What Heero had been expecting to see, he wasn’t sure, but he was greeted with a nondescript hallway, lowly lit, doors evenly spaced on either side, a threadbare carpet that had once been patterned but now was mostly dirt laid on the floor. The walls were not wood here, but concrete, plastered over and painted a dingy yellow, though its original off-white coloring showed through cracks and holes in the finish. It was a colony apartment building of the style more familiar to Heero, cold and stark and empty. There was more white visible on the walls than yellow, and more graffiti than even that. Spread across the right wall, spanning across several doors, was  _Ella Doesn’t Know_. A few illegible scrawls were sprayed on top of that, or penned on, or scratched in, maybe names, maybe epithets.  
  
“I know this place,” Duo said, taking a step forward into the hall. “We moved buildings because the old one started to fall apart. Solo said it wasn’t safe, and we came here. Then the plague came and Solo got sick.”  
  
“Is this where he--?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
A knot tightened in Heero’s stomach at the misery laid bare on Duo’s face.   
  
“I’ve had so many dreams about this fucking place,” Duo continued. “I can’t believe I’m here again. It looks exactly the same.” He turned to Heero with a grim smile. “Must be because this is all out of my head, huh?”  
  
He turned back to peer down the hall. “Looks like the fun is starting again.”  
  
Heero followed his gaze up the far wall, where writing was forming, curling over the old epithets and scrawls, the faded, peeling paint. He felt a strange sense of powerlessness as he watched the letters construct themselves into words, unable to stop them, and aware of the damage they would do.  
  
 _Guilty guilty guilty  
  
Little murdering rat criminal filth  
  
You know what you did  
  
GUILTY_  
  
Duo began to walk, staring resolutely down the hallway as he hurried past the writing, the words continuing to form, tumbling down the wall as he turned and racing past him, eager to be seen. Heero was close behind, rushing to keep step beside Duo, whose dark eyes burned bright with anger.  
  
“Duo!” That hoarse rasp of a voice echoed from the hall behind them, and was ignored. They turned another corner and here the hall stretched out impossibly long ahead of them. Blood-red writing rushed past them on both walls.  
  
“Hey kid, I’m talking to you!”  
  
The writing turned dark, sinking deep into the faded plaster, bubbling and hissing as it corroded the paint. The words tumbled over each other, and the hissing rose in the air and drowned out the sound of Heero’s heart thundering in his chest, the angry voice echoing in the hall behind them, everything, and now the hissing was a scream in his mind, the words refusing not to be read, not to be acknowledged:  
  
 _Guilty little Duo don’t you know what you did  
  
You say he was sick you say but that isn’t true it isn’t true you lied   
  
You lied and lied YOU lied to YOURSELF  
  
HE WASN’T SICK WHEN HE DIED WAS HE DUO WAS HE DUO WAS HE  
  
TELL US WHAT YOU DID _  
  
“I don’t know!” Duo shouted, and now the screaming was a whine, a drone of a siren sounding, thundering around them. No, not again, not here. The carpet began to pull up from the floor, Heero could feel it move under him. It was blackening, charring, the concrete starting to crumble beneath it, eroding to scaffolding, rusty and bloodied. The words on the walls melted into vicious red slashes, then burned away as the walls themselves receded, leaving uneven, gaping holes, and red, so much red, filth and grime and disease and blood.  
  
Something roared down the hall behind them and with it came a shout in that hoarse, rough voice:  
  
“DUO!”  
  
They began to run toward the end of the long, long hallway, even as the place crumbled around them and the siren screamed over their heads. The ship had become the memory, and now it was becoming the nightmare, and whether whatever was chasing them was Solo or Duo’s very subconscious itself... they couldn’t let it catch them. It couldn’t catch Duo. Heero just knew, in the deepest emotional core of his brain, that something terrible would happen if it did. They ran as fast as they could, Duo sprinting with the assistance of pure panic, Heero one step after him, a moment behind.  
  
“DUO!” The howl came around the corner, and now it was in the hallway with them, bearing down. Heero didn’t turn to look, unwilling to slow down for even that long, but he could feel it just behind them, reaching for them. He felt the horror of its presence, the terror of its power, its desire to harm them. They ran.  
  
There was a door at the end of the corridor. In ten seconds they would reach it. But the thing behind them was faster than that. If he gave an extra burst of speed now, he could grab Duo and haul them in together, escape the thing and the sirens’ wail and the hell that was forming in the hall around them. He jutted forward, feeling the tendons in his legs tighten, his enhanced muscles preparing for the exertion. Duo was two steps ahead of him, he would reach him, and they--  
  
In the space Duo had stepped over an instant before, a hole opened, a black, empty void, stretching wide with impossible speed, and Heero realized he was going to fall into it, that the ship had conjured it for just that purpose.  _No..._  
  
Duo was at the door, throwing it open, and as he turned to shut it, he realized Heero was no longer there, and their eyes made contact for a single, terrible moment.  
  
No! Duo!  _No!_  
  
The thing rushed past him, through the door, and then he was falling, away from Duo and deep, deep into the darkness below the floor.   
  
He landed seconds later on hard, flat ground, and he was up in an instant, staring up at the hole above him through burning, wet eyes. One word, the one he despised the most, came to him: failure.  
  
He had failed, failed to protect Duo, failed him utterly. He was alone up there, with that  _thing_! Christ!  
  
Something rustled behind him and Heero whirled, gun drawn. He was in a large laboratory room, a medical cot in front of him, like those he used to lie on when the doctors had augmented his strength and purged his emotions.   
  
This must be his hell. Not blood and metal and fire, but cold, hostile sterility.  
  
Another noise, a stirring from the far end of the room, and he realized he was not alone, not at all. There were monsters here with him. His own.  
  
They resembled the awful thing from the mess hall, charred and irreparably damaged, yet somehow standing under their own power, or the power of his memory. Their limbs had melted together, forming profane lumps of flesh and bone, skin blistered and black, their faces shapeless masses of wet gleaming tissue without features to distinguish them anymore. And the smell, the choking stench of them, the acrid stinging clog in his nostrils, he finally recognized it to be that of human flesh burned to a crisp.   
  
He understood now that he had done this, these were his victims just like the little girl, killed in combat or merely as contingencies, the accidental tragedies of war, deaths and injuries he no longer even remembered inflicting, the monster that he was. There were many here, in the room with him, mouths gaping without tongues or teeth to disturb the expanses of black, but there were surely many more than even this. He had killed hundreds, maybe thousands. He had been very good at it. Once, it had even given him pride, to be able to cause this kind of damage to a human body, to snuff life out so efficiently. They were here because they wanted to exact judgment, just like the little girl. And he certainly deserved it. He bore all the guilt for these deaths, these mangled corpses shambling toward him...  
  
But Duo was up there, somewhere, and he was in danger, trapped in his own torment. And Heero had promised to protect him.   
  
If he sacrificed himself here, in absolution for his guilt, then he was sacrificing Duo as well.   
  
That price was too high to pay. He would damn himself to hell a thousand times over, damn himself to bear this crushing guilt for a lifetime, if it meant Duo was safe. He would die for him-- nothing else.  
  
Knowing what he had to do, Heero trained his gun on the first of his victims and fired. It gurgled, stumbling, and fell lifelessly to the ground, a smoking hole burned into the oozing flesh of its forehead.   
  
He shot the next and the splat of its ruined body to the floor didn’t even make him flinch.   
  
With practiced ease, he executed every last one, like he had done to each before, until they lay in a gruesome arc around him, gleaming and putrid, blood and ooze and bile pooling around their corpses in a stinking miasma of death.  
  
He loaded another clip into his gun and turned back to the hole in the ceiling. The laboratory was stark and white and its walls were smooth plasticine material, but the sides of the void overhead were the rusting scaffold of Duo’s nightmare world. He pulled the medical cot under the hole and climbed on top of it, stretching to scrape his fingers across the rough metal of the hole’s interior. He found purchase, and pulled himself bodily up into the dark, musty space.   
  
Without even turning to look behind him at his own conjured torment, Heero began to climb, toward Duo, toward the only thing that mattered.  
  
* * * *  
  
Duo crashed into the room and managed only to slam the door shut behind him before crumpling in a heap to the floor. Despair shook him, choked his throat, made him swallow back bile. His breath was ragged and sharp, his heart a shuddering pain in his chest. He curled his fingers into the filthy carpet beneath him and shut his eyes against the hot wet sorrow threatening to blind his vision.  
  
Heero was gone. The nightmare had swallowed him up and he was gone, fallen through the floor, lost to him. He had failed him. He had sworn on his life that he would keep Heero safe, and instead he had let the ship get him, he had let terror overcome him and Heero had paid the price. God, no. No! How could he have let this happen? How could he have failed to protect Heero, his partner, the only goddamn person he cared about in his miserable life?   
  
He was gone. Heero was  _gone_.  
  
A hot tear rolled down his cheek and he wiped it hastily away, and rubbed at his eyes until he no longer felt the sting of unshed tears. There was no time for that right now. If he began to cry, he feared he would never stop. There just... wasn’t time.   
  
“It’s better this way.”  
  
Duo scrambled up from the floor, drawing a hitching breath. Something had said that, whispered it in his ear. He’d felt the hot breath on his skin. Whirling around, he peered into the low-lit space of the room. Nothing was there, nothing that he could see, anyway. But what he could see made his reddened eyes go wide and his heart pound helplessly. He knew where he was.  
  
Countless nightmares had invoked this place, this dark, cold apartment with its fetid, damp carpet, boarded-over windows, broken furniture, its bare, infested mattress abandoned on the floor, but even those could not reproduce the image of this room with the clarity Duo now saw it with. This was no mere memory.   
  
He was  _in_  the room where Solo died.   
  
Christ. It even smelled the same, that sick-sweet plague smell. He could feel his skin go clammy as it hit his nostrils, invaded his senses. It made emotions he had thought long forgotten come rushing back to him.   
  
This was Solo’s room, because he was the boss, and older than all of them to boot, so he got first pick. Duo and the other kids slept in the room next door, huddled together for warmth, under blankets swarming with fleas and lice; they were always itchy with bites, but at least they weren’t cold. A bunch of them didn’t have names, street-rat orphans the lot of them. Solo gave them names, short ones, so they could spell them better, save them time when tagging walls and buildings. Ace. Dan. Rose. Mia. Duo.  
  
Solo taught him everything, how to steal without getting caught, how to pick any lock he came across, where to hide when he wasn’t quite sneaky enough, how to write both of their names, the alphabet, numbers, anything he wanted to learn. And, in return, Duo had loved him, loved Solo in the all-encompassing way of a child. He was mature and wise and could do no wrong in his eyes. Though they were wretches, they were okay as long as Solo was looking after them.  
  
Then the plague had come. It took Mia first, she was small and weak and always catching colds, and that’s what they thought it was at first, a cold. Duo and Rose had stolen medicine for her, to make the coughing stop, but it wouldn’t, she wouldn’t stop, not even when blood came up instead of phlegm. Then, the fever had come, and she had slipped away so fast, until she seemed barely there at all, just a tiny, pale body breathing weakly under the blankets. Solo had realized she was contagious and had moved her away from the others when she had gotten really bad, and so Duo hadn’t seen her in her last moments. Solo had told him. And then, because he had been around Mia so much, Solo got sick too, though he pretended he was fine for as long as he could.   
  
Duo could still remember that racking cough, the way it made Solo double over, made him shudder when he finally pulled himself up again. He remembered the night Solo came down with the fever, sitting at his bedside on the bare, stained mattress, praying to God that he would be saved.   
  
Wait, they had prayed for  _Mia_ , he and Solo, as she was laid out on his bed, praying for her to wake up, to get better. But he had prayed for Solo, too, right? Solo had come down with a fever, hadn’t he? They all did, that’s what the plague did to you. You felt dizzy and you coughed a lot and then you slipped into a fever for good, for ever. And Solo had begun to get dizzy and then he was coughing, coughing all the time, and then...  
  
And then...  
  
And then?  
  
But that was all he could remember. There was nothing beyond that memory, nothing save for the image of Solo from his nightmares, lying lifeless on the ground before reaching up to grab him, to bring him down to hell too. Why couldn’t he remember anything else? Had the trauma of watching his best friend die been too great? Or was it... something else?  
  
What had he forgotten?  
  
In the din of his pounding heart and the rushing of blood in his ears, he almost missed the whisper.  
  
“It’s just us now, Duo. Just you and me.”  
  
He wasn’t alone in the room. That voice, made hoarse by a throat raw from coughing... it belonged to Solo. It was the voice from the hall, that had chased him here. Solo was here with him.  
  
He whirled, trying to spot him, but all he saw were shadows, creeping in the corners of the room, swirling up to the ceiling. He was here though, he could feel his presence all around him, and the thought filled him with inexplicable terror.  
  
A cough echoed around the room, and then Duo saw him in the corner, a shadow much darker than the rest, a black smudge against the grey wall.  
  
Duo swallowed and spoke. “What did you want to show me?”   
  
And saying it then, he realized that he had said it before, as a child, standing in this very room. He had been worried because Solo wasn’t supposed to be walking around, he was supposed to be in bed. He hadn’t been looking good, haggard and pale, but still smiling, trying to look strong so Duo wouldn’t worry about him. The others had been out, but he had stayed behind... he had been worried about Solo and he wanted to stay by him in case he needed anything.  _Come on kid, I wanna show you something._ And he had followed Solo back to his room, watching carefully for signs of fever, signs he was getting worse...  
  
The black swirling cloud at the far end of the room began to peel off the wall and coalesce into a physical shape, with a booming rush of air around him, until it was no longer just a shadow. Eyes as blue as the ocean opened from within the frothing mass. Solo.   
  
“I can’t believe you didn’t remember,” Solo said, though no mouth had yet formed out of the cloud. “You didn’t remember the gift I tried to give you?”  
  
A lamp, its bulb long broken, skated across the floor and absorbed into the shadow of Solo’s form, disappearing entirely. The carpet under his feet, too, rolled away into the roiling mass. The lines of a narrow jaw and hollow cheeks began to take shape in the black void.  
  
They had stood in this room, Duo still small, wearing filthy clothes too large for his meager frame, and Solo had been by the boarded up window with his back turned, beside the set of dresser drawers with the broken leg. Solo was coughing, but he didn’t have a fever yet...  
  
No. Not ‘yet’. Never.  
  
He never had a fever. Duo couldn’t remember the fever because it had never happened. Instead...  
  
“I asked you to be my right hand man,” Solo said, “I asked you if you knew what it meant. And what did you say?”  
  
Blue eyes glowed with supernatural intensity, fixed on him. He was too scared to move, held in place by a terror he’d only ever experienced once before. Here.  
  
“I said I would follow you wherever you went.” His mouth was so dry, the words were a whisper.   
  
“Wherever I went!” Solo bellowed, and now he was huge, huge in the darkness, no longer a shadow but made of flesh, brown hair and deep blue eyes and that crooked smile Duo had practiced so hard to emulate. But he was much larger than any person could ever be, here in his nightmare, he was as large as if Duo was a small child again, and loomed over him, taking a step away from the corner of the room, a step towards him.  
  
“Wherever I went, right?” He’d repeated, that day, and he’d turned to him and Duo could see the blood speckling his lips and the glint of something in his hands. Was that what he wanted to give him? “You said that you would follow me... wherever I went.”  
  
The thing in his hands was small and narrow, glinting in the meager light... with a small, smooth handle where Solo held it, the blade away from his body... the blade of a knife.  
  
Duo’s mind reeled and he staggered backward, and Solo walked grimly forward. There was no knife in his hand here, no hand at all-- a bloody mangled mess forming a serrated point, a dangerously sharp edge. The space around his eyes were hollow sockets, but their piercing blue gaze remained on him.   
  
Duo had frozen at the sight of the knife, and hadn’t heard what Solo had said next, his mind had gone utterly blank with terror. He’d understood it all with horrific clarity. He wanted him to follow him wherever he went.   
  
Solo had been dying of the plague... and he’d wanted Duo to follow him into oblivion.   
  
Duo hit the wall, and Solo bore down on him, his blue eyes sharp, sharp as the weapon the ship had twisted his body into.   
  
“...me alone...” Solo had said, his voice coming in and out of focus as Duo had tried with all his might to make sense of the terrible thing Solo wanted to do. All he could see was the knife in his hands, the vicious gleam of it. “You can’t leave me alone, Duo. You’re all I’ve got.”  
  
“No, Solo, don’t, please...”  
  
And then Solo had attacked.  
  
Solo had always been the better fighter, and Duo had been young and too scared to think straight. When Solo had grabbed him and taken him to the ground, Duo had only barely managed to twist out of his hands, aided by his small frame. But Solo had strength and experience on his side, and had gotten a grip on his leg and pulled him reeling back even as he had scrambled desperately for purchase on the bare floor. Everything after that had been instinct, the blind fight of a cornered prey animal. Solo had stabbed at him with the knife and the hiss of it slicing through the air had rang in his ears, the low, muffled thump of it hitting concrete where his body had been moments before. Then, Duo had kicked upwards, into Solo’s stomach, and sent him flying backwards, hitting the dresser with a hard smack. The plague really had made him weak; Duo would have never been able to do that had Solo been well.   
  
The first moment after Solo had gone flying, Duo had instinctively wanted to run and see if he was okay. It was only a second or too later that the horrible reality of the situation had dawned again on him: his best friend was trying to kill him. The realization had spurred him to stand and stagger in short-breathed panic to the door, but Solo had recovered by then and had attacked again, and they had tumbled and tumbled on the floor, Solo’s free hand locked horrifically tight on Duo’s arm, and all Duo could think was that the knife was so close, so very close to him...  
  
And somewhere in the confusion and the terror Duo had done the only thing he could think of, he had grabbed for the knife in Solo’s broad hand and pushed it toward his best friend’s gut, pushed and pushed until the only thing he felt was the meager resistance of skin to sharp metal and then a hot wet gush rush over both of their hands.  
  
And the painful grip on his shoulder eased, and Solo had slumped to the floor, Duo holding the knife, it and them and the floor covered in red. It had pooled around his friend’s body, expanding around the both of them, and it had grown and grown, like it would never stop.   
  
Duo had run, run far from the apartment, from the Wasteland itself, and by the time he had returned, the horror and the blood and the reality of what Solo had tried to do, and what  _he_  had done to him, all of it had been placed somewhere very far down and dark inside of him. He had  _had_  to forget.   
  
He would have gone insane otherwise.  
  
Well, he had forgotten, but not forgiven. Seeing Solo standing in front of him now, his hand twisted into a grotesque blade of flesh and blood, seething at him through that long brown hair, those blue eyes, made that clear. He had never forgiven himself, and now Solo could not forgive him. Solo was still trying to bring them together again, in death. And stopping him meant...  
  
Stopping him meant plunging that knife into his heart again. Killing the first thing he had ever loved, the first person to give a damn about him. To give him a name. To call him a friend. A brother.  
  
Solo took another heavy step toward him and Duo found himself speaking.  
  
“I remember now, Solo,” he said. “I remember everything. I’m sorry I forgot what I did. I’m so sorry.”  
  
Something passed through him at the words, a rush like relief through his veins, like he had been waiting to say that without knowing it for years. But it was fleeting. As it drained from his system, he was left with the grim knowledge of what he had to do.   
  
Killing Solo once had damned him, sent him on a path to the destruction of countless more lives, and led him inexorably here to this nightmare, this hell borne of his damaged mind. God only knew what killing him twice would do. Maybe it would be that final atrocity, that last little push into total psychotic insanity. He didn’t doubt it.  
  
But he knew what his decision was, what it would always be. Solo was no longer the most important person in his world. Neither, even, was he.   
  
The person with whom his decision lay was somewhere in the ship below them, and even not knowing whether he was hurt or alive or dead could change the fact that he was what Duo lived for, died for, would damn himself to hell for, a thousand more times, with a goddamn smile on his face. Anything or anyone that stood in his way to getting back to Heero would be taken down.   
  
Even if doing so destroyed him.  
  
“I’m sorry, Solo,” Duo said now, taking a step off the wall, and towards the memory of the boy who had once been his greatest and closest friend. “But I can’t go with you.”  
  
There was a grating, horrible yell, and Solo came at him, monstrous and huge, terrible arm out, its dangerous edge slashing at him in wide arcs. Instinct overwhelmed fear and Duo dove for another wall, scrambling to stand again. Solo whirled to face him, blue eyes flashing. He lunged again, low, aiming for his heels, scrapping like the street-rats they were.  
  
But Duo’s fighting had finessed, improved immeasurably since he was a kid on the streets, and that ruthless, take-no-prisoners style of combat Solo had taught him so well was now augmented by skill and practice. He deftly avoided the lunge, somersaulting to a safer part of the room. Still, Solo was huge and towering over him, his movements hastened, strengthened by anger, and Duo barely had time to stand up before Solo was on him again, reaching for him with terrible speed.   
  
He dodged another attempt at a grab, leaping artlessly out of the way of the broad hand straining for his arm, but realized too late it was a feint, a bluff-- Solo’s macabre blade sliced at him too quickly to avoid. He rolled, but heard the slash of it cutting the air above him an instant before his leg exploded in pain. He scrambled out of the way of a second attempt with the blade, feeling the hot rush of blood down his pant leg as he moved. The cut was deep. He could only hope the blood wasn’t arterial.   
  
Solo bore down on him, the room seeming to shrink around his form, and Duo barely had time to stand before he had to leap again out of the way of that horrible weapon, the scrape of metal against concrete over his head telling him he had only barely managed to avoid its attack. He was going to die if he kept this up much longer-- the blinding throb of pain in his leg told him that. Shit, he needed an opening!  
  
He reached a corner of the room, wobbling slightly on his injured leg. Solo lunged for him, and he rolled to the next corner, his breath coming in rough pants. Another lunge, another dodge, blood pounding in his ears and pouring steadily down his leg, coating the floor, making it slick. He rolled, trying to reach the far end of the room, but he wasn’t fast enough, slowed by his injury, and Solo grabbed him and they toppled to the floor.  
  
It had been just like this before, they had struggled with the knife against each other, only the white-hot panic of pure terror driving Duo’s actions as he fought for his life against his friend. He ended up on his back, Solo’s enormous form looming above him, and the blue-eyed boy gave him a final, triumphant smile before raising his bladed arm to give the final, fatal strike.  
  
But even huge as he was, and small as Duo had been, Solo had been gravely sick with the plague-- and was weaker than he looked. That’s right-- it had been mostly bluffing, mostly bravado, and even scrawny little Duo had been able to send him flying with just one well-placed kick to the gut. His arm raised high, ready to kill, Solo had inadvertently left himself wide open, and Duo saw his opportunity. Ignoring the searing pain in his injured leg, he reared back and kicked Solo hard, as hard as he could. And just like his size had belied his frailty before, Solo’s body felt lighter and weaker under his boots than he appeared, and he went tumbling backwards, slamming hard into the dresser at the wall.  
  
There would be no second opportunity. Next time, Solo would not leave himself open. This was it.   
  
Duo took a long, last look at his first true friend. Even after everything, he still loved him.  
  
“Sorry, Solo.”  
  
Then, he drew his gun, aimed it steadily between those deep blue eyes, and fired.  
  
He only had time to see the hole form in the clammy skin of Solo’s forehead before his body began to convulse and seize, acrid smoke pouring obscenely from every orifice. His mangled arm twitched, the bloody end pulsing, throbbing. Duo grimaced, but stared in morbid, horrified fascination.  
  
There came a booming roar of air that seemed to originate from within Solo’s body, and all at once he vaporized, disintegrated instantly as that black smoke filled the room, billowing over and around Duo until he couldn’t see anything but its roiling shadow. The rushing howl of air grew louder, louder, until it deafened him, rang in his ears like a bomb going off. The room began to rumble and quake around him, and he could feel the concrete of the floor cracking and shifting under his feet, sending him to a knee as his injured leg stumbled under the assault. He could only stay there as the hell around him began to crumble and collapse.  
  
Then he felt a warm, strong hand close around his arm, lifting him bodily to his feet. Through the deafening roar all around, he heard a deep, familiar voice shout for him.  
  
“Duo!”  
  
Heero. For a moment, Duo thought his heart might just give out. He had never been so goddamn glad to hear his voice.  
  
“Can you walk?” Heero shouted.  
  
“Yeah!” Duo said, though his bleeding leg screamed otherwise. There was no time to worry about it. Nothing mattered save that Heero was safe.  
  
“Then let’s get the hell out of here!”  
  
And with that, they tore out of the room and into the hallway of what was once again the Persephone Four, the L-2 building gone, gone forever. They were outside the Captain’s Cabin, as if they’d never left it.   
  
The ship was crumbling around them-- no, it was disintegrating. The howling roar was the sound of its layers peeling away into nothingness. The panels of the walls on either side of them appeared to be sinking inwards, the holes forming in their absence growing alarmingly fast.  
  
“We don’t have any time!” Heero said, and they took off down the hallway, heading for the docking bay, passing laboratories quickly vaporizing into black holes and offices that had already dissolved into empty voids. Everything was melting away. Duo’s leg screamed in pain at every step he took, but he pushed it to the back of his mind and focused on his partner, on Heero, as they ran for their lives.  
  
They turned the corner to the mess hall and Duo looked in to see the tables and chairs being pulled outward, stretching impossibly far, sucked into an emptiness that seemed to stretch beyond infinity. It was terrifying and beautiful; he felt strangely drawn toward it, toward that pulling, endless nothing--  
  
Heero tugged him past the door, and his gaze into the abyss was mercifully broken.  
  
They flew around the next corner and there was the docking bay, doors open, and they sprinted to their ship, intact and still humming in hibernation, and they threw themselves inside it, Heero reaching the cockpit first, flying to the computer and booting up the activation sequence, hands gripping the controls so tight it looked like he might rip them right off.  
  
The Persephone Four was screaming and roaring in its death throes, the edges of the wide docking bay already succumbing to their oblivion, walls disintegrating into blackness, exposing the starry expanse of space beyond them.   
  
Duo lifted shaking fingers to the console and entered the universal unlock sequence code for the doors, and, powerless now, the Persephone’s bay doors swung open under their command even as the void claimed them, ate them away.   
  
Heero didn’t even wait for them to finish opening before he was throwing the Icelus forward with the force of all its thrusters, sending them careening out of the Persephone and into the safety of open space.   
  
They were free.  
  
Heero didn’t take a second look behind them as they rushed away from the doomed ship, but Duo turned and watched in strange silent fascination.  
  
The Persephone’s form seemed to twist, curl itself into an impossible spiral, the doors they had come through now only a blurry hole against the backdrop of the mutated ship. Then, from its center, he saw a great void open, a vast nothingness, blacker than the universe itself, and the Persephone collapsed into it, pulled like water through a funnel, and then it vanished entirely, winking out to nothing, leaving only empty space in its wake.   
  
It was gone.  
  
* * * *  
  
Duo turned at the sound of the bunk door sliding open. Heero entered, looking exhausted in every way that counted. Duo gave him a short, weak smile and imagined he must have looked even worse for wear.  
  
“How’s your leg?”  
  
“It’ll survive,” Duo said, running a hand over the thick gauze bandaged tightly around it. “Didn’t do a great job stitching it, though. Let me tell you, I can’t  _wait_  until people ask me how I got  _that_  scar.”  
  
Heero sat down on the bed, on Duo’s uninjured side. After a moment, he leaned over and slid a hand into one of Duo’s, staring down at their intertwined fingers for a while in silence.   
  
“Did you call in the casualties?” Duo asked softly.   
  
Heero nodded, running a thumb over the back of Duo’s hand.  
  
“Noin have anything to say about it?” He continued, though he knew the answer.   
  
Forty-three people presumed dead, eight of them Preventers, plus one very expensive research space station lost to another dimension, or Hell itself. Noin would certainly have something to say about it.  
  
Heero sighed, and pulled their hands into his lap. “Suffice to say there’s going to be a very thorough and fruitless investigation into the matter.”  
  
They sat silent again for a few minutes before Heero spoke again.  
  
“Duo, I was thinking... when we get back, maybe we should... take some time off. Get away from work for a while, go on a trip, something like that. I think... well, I think we could  _both_  use it.”  
  
Duo let out a slow exhale of breath. “Yeah.”  
  
“We’re... okay, right?”   
  
Duo stared at him. Slowly, Heero lifted his eyes, turned to meet his gaze. He had never seen him look so uncertain, so unsure.  
  
Duo’s battered heart twisted in his chest, and he pulled his hand from Heero’s grip to throw his arms around his partner’s neck and send them crashing gently into the mattress.  
  
“Of course,” Duo said, his voice muffled against Heero’s jacket. Heero’s hands came up to sink almost painfully tightly in Duo’s hair, heart beating rapidly under Duo’s ear.  
  
They had fallen into nightmares of their own creation, and while his leg was stitched up, there were scars far deeper and more dangerous laying wide open inside of him, and surely inside Heero, too. Separately, they were far from okay.   
  
But together, they couldn’t be broken.  
  
They lay together like that a long time, just gratefully absorbing the contact. Perhaps he would never really acknowledge just how close he had come to losing this. Maybe he would store that deep down, too, somewhere, and maybe with time it wouldn’t seem quite so frightening to confront. But not now, not while Heero’s heart was beating beneath him like this, still unsteady. It was all still too... close.  
  
He knew they wouldn’t sleep anytime soon, there was no chance of that; he knew that they would make love before they returned to Earth, that they had to. And every inch of him wanted to stay there, wrapped around Heero on the bed, feeling his warm breath fan out against his forehead, feeling  _him_  there, feeling safe for the first time in a long time. But there was something he still had to do.  
  
Duo reluctantly rose, catching the hand Heero reached for him with and taking it in one of his own.   
  
“I’ll be right back,” he said softly, then leaned down and took Heero’s mouth in a kiss. “Then I’ll show you just how good we are.”  
  
Heero let him go, and though his expression belied his concern, he didn’t say anything. Duo glanced at him one more time, then slipped out into the hallway, heading down the dim corridor toward the back of the ship, one hand curling into his jacket pocket, remaining there until he arrived at his destination. He came to the end of the hall, where the small, round cylinder chute of the waste disposal bin stood before him.   
  
Here, he pulled out his hand from his pocket and opened it to reveal what had been concealed there: a tiny, gold cross, glittering weakly in the low light.  
  
Duo stared at it for a long time, letting memories flow freely through him at the sight, one last time. He brought it to his lips and placed them to it, a final apology.   
  
Then, before he could change his mind, he pulled open the hatch of the waste bin, slipped the gilded chain inside, and pressed the button that released the contents outside.  
  
The cross shot out into open space, jetting away from the ship with the force of its ejection, glittering under the exterior lights, a little, beautiful thing. A precious thing, but one he had to let go. Duo watched it tumble weightlessly away, turning and turning, until its golden sparkle blended into the gleam of the stars beyond and he could no longer make it out.  
  
He couldn’t apologize for all of the things he had done, couldn’t tell all the people that he wanted to that he was sorry. There were some things that couldn’t be forgiven, things he didn’t deserve forgiveness for. No, he couldn’t be absolved of all the guilt he carried with him.  
  
But he could live with it. He could accept that it would somehow always be a part of him, instead of running away from it. Instead of destroying himself in a futile search for forgiveness.  
  
There were more important things than forgiveness. A more important person.  
  
And, turning from the window, Duo slipped back down the hall to return to him.   
  


 

The End


End file.
